Métropoles, n°35/2024

Popular with many elected representatives, practitioners and civil society players, experimentation, once confined to laboratory and scientific activities, is now one of the essential modalities of contemporary urbanism. But what about the experimental approach itself? Does it refer to the importance of "doing it for real", "doing it on a 1:1 scale", over other activities that are more akin to planning or design? Does it involve overemphasizing the regime of experience or incrementalism? Or, on the contrary, should experimentation be seen as a prerequisite for innovation? These are just some of the questions to which the various contributions in this special issue seek to provide answers. Whether we are looking at the experimental schemes themselves, analysing their institutionalisation or observing the urban and political contexts in which they are deployed and established, it is clear that experimentation is an observable in its own right in urban research. At one and the same time instruments of demonstration policies, vehicles of innovation or analysers of austerity urbanism, objects of controversy, renewed forms of collective action or vectors of gentrification, the urban experiments explored here are proving to be richly instructive on current changes in the ways in which the city is shaped, governed and told.