De quoi l’expérimentation urbaine est-elle le nom ?

Experimentation, popular with many elected representatives, practitioners and civil society players, has evolved from being confined to laboratory and scientific activities to becoming 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’ or ‘doing it on a 1:1 scale’ over other activities more aligned with planning or design? Does it involve overemphasising 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 evident that experimentation is observable in its own right in urban research. Whether they are 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 rich with lessons regarding current changes in how the city is shaped, governed, and narrated.