Making futures with urban experiments: picturing, preparing and persuading

Abstract For city planners, public experimentation has become an attractive tool to “look into the future”, increasingly including novel technologies: Actors test novel mobility options, such as autonomous driving on urban roads to receive real-world feedback on their prototypes; and digital technologies are used to create virtual spaces of experimentation to explore interventions in urban space before implementation. Paying explicit attention to the performative character of experiments and the mechanisms by which they make envisioned futures more plausible than others, we build on the concept of “techniques of futuring” (ToF) to better understand the role of experiments in urban transformations. We ask: How do urban experiments perform mobility futures and how does the performance make these futures plausible? We provide empirical insights on two cases of experimental environments in Munich: a living lab for autonomous driving and an urban digital twin for novel bicycle infrastructure design. We identify three core performative mechanisms by which urban experimentation contributes to making certain futures plausible: picturing the vision, preparing the city, and persuading the public. These mechanisms show how experiments involving novel technologies can become powerful in underpinning the presented visions of future mobility. At the same time, they call for caution when the allure of these mechanisms outplays alternative ways of deliberating and creating mobility futures.