From Smart City Field Tests to Scalable Urban Experiments: The Case of Paris’ Urban Lab

• In Event: Landscapes of Urban Laboratization: Governing the City Through Labs

Abstract

Urban experiments, an arguably loose category, are becoming a crucial component of contemporary city government and a trope for urban planners and STS scholars alike. Rather than assuming any experimental ethos, this paper focuses on actual sites branded as urban laboratories and follows the development of an experimental mode of urban innovation inside Paris’ municipality. There, experimentation is construed as a means of economic development and knowledge-production, and as a technology for representing and governing urban futures. Through in-depth fieldwork in two Quartiers d’Innovation Urbaine (Urban Innovation Districts) in Paris, I show that the delineation and assemblage of these sites is a problematic operation in itself, where the tension between representativeness and idiosyncrasy has to be managed. The Paris Urban Lab experimenters have assembled two kinds of truth-spot: a first, newly redeveloped site acts as a uniquely suitable testbed for smart city futures (autonomous vehicles, “smart streets”), while another, comparatively poor neighbourhood is presented as representative of wider urban issues (ageing infrastructures, migrations), fit for the shorter-term development of scalable and exportable "solutions". The Urban Lab, working for the city of Paris, has explicitly embedded different sociotechnical imaginaries in these two experimental sites. In each, public demonstrations have taken place, aimed at distinct audiences. Contrasting the two cases shows a city dealing with competing political futures for urban laboratorization, but also questions how urban experiments may contribute in multiple ways to landscapes, knowledge and political identities.

Author

• Felix Talvard, Center for the Sociology of Innovation - Mines ParisTech