Landscapes of Urban Laboratization: Governing the City Through Labs

Abstract

The vocabulary of experiments is increasingly being used outside of scientific settings, describing knowledge production practices formerly taking place in the laboratory and now encompassing the whole of society (Gross and Krohn 2005). Urban laboratization (Guggenheim 2012) landscapes offer new types of experimental spaces – living and urban labs, hackathons, fablabs and test-beds, which fail classification as laboratories in the classical sense. These experimental spaces play with the boundaries of science and governance, developing into new socio-material infrastructures for urban governance. Unpacking this laboratization landscape reveals how these spaces, as new technologies of governing cities, shape urban discourse and policy.
This panel invites papers scrutinizing the emergence of different kinds of labs in urban governance, critically addressing epistemic and institutional boundary conditions of such experimentalization. As the mundane character of most labs is at odds with futuristic notions of high tech ‘smart cities’, we are interested in the imageries of futurity embedded in these spaces and the expectations of urban life they generate. A cosmopolitics (Stengers 2003; Beck 2004) perspective sensitizes to otherness as key factor of experiments, often characterized by an asymmetry that must be negotiated. Contributing to STS analyses of ‘smart city’ governance and scientific citizenship, papers may tackle the following dimensions:

• What discourses, practices and infrastructures afford labs’ emergence?
• What types of knowledge are produced and how are these translated to forms of citizenship?
• How do labs become and function as ‘truth-spots’ (Gieryn 2006) in urban politics?
• How do experimental spaces reconfigure urban governance and assemble city landscapes?

Discussants

• Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Stefan Boeschen, Chair of Society and Technology RWTH Aachen University

Individual Presentations

• Behavioral Field Trials in Urban Dental Care - Tim Seitz, Technical University Berlin

• From Smart City Field Tests to Scalable Urban Experiments: The Case of Paris’ Urban Lab - Felix Talvard, Center for the Sociology of Innovation - Mines ParisTech

• Urban Labs: A Critical Perspective on Urban Laboratization Practices - Sabrina Huizenga, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management

Session Organizers

• Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management

• Hadrien Macq, Université de Liège

• Sabrina Huizenga, Erasmus University Rotterdam