Experimental Governance and Urban Planning Futures: Five Strategic Functions for Municipalities in Local Innovation

Erica Eneqvist and Andrew Karvonen
Additional contact information
Erica Eneqvist: Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden / Division of Built Environment, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
Andrew Karvonen: Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Urban Planning, 2021, vol. 6, issue 1, 183-194

Abstract: Experimental governance is increasingly being implemented in cities around the world through laboratories, testbeds, platforms, and innovation districts to address a wide range of complex sustainability challenges. Experiments often involve public-private partnerships and triple helix collaborations with the municipality as a key stakeholder. This stretches the responsibilities of local authorities beyond conventional practices of policymaking and regulation to engage in more applied, collaborative, and recursive forms of planning. In this article, we examine how local authorities are involved in experimental governance and how this is influencing their approach to urban development. We are specifically interested in the multiple strategic functions that municipalities play in experimental governance and the broader implications to existing urban planning practices and norms. We begin the article by developing an analytic framework of the most common strategic functions of municipalities in experimental governance and then apply this framework to Stockholm, a city that has embraced experimental governance as a means to realise its sustainability ambitions. Our findings reveal how the strategic functions of visioning, facilitating, supporting, amplifying, and guarding are producing new opportunities and challenges to urban planning practices in twenty-first century cities.

Keywords: collaboration; experimental governance; experimentation; municipalities; urban planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/3396 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:urbpla:v6:y:2021:i:1:p:183-194

DOI: 10.17645/up.v6i1.3396

Access Statistics for this article

Urban Planning is currently edited by Tiago Cardoso

More articles in Urban Planning from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().