Paper short abstract:

A global drive towards experimentation and 'citizen scientists' as participants is turning cities into 'living labs' or 'test-beds'. The paper explores notions of laboratory and experiment at play in such endeavours and asks what kinds of experimental thinking are guiding urban living labs projects.

Paper long abstract:

A global drive towards experiments and experimentation and the idea of 'citizen scientists' as participants is turning cities into 'living labs' or 'test-beds'. This paper explores practices and notions of laboratory and experiment at play in such endeavours and ask what kinds of experimental thinking are guiding urban living labs projects today. I argue that urban experiments are often not considered scientistic 'demonstration devices' to prove certain facts, inferences or extrapolations, and their proliferation does not reflect modernistic visions of urban science. They are far more speculative and creative. Drawing on the philosophy of science of Francis Bacon, Ian Hacking (1983) suggested that experiments are not "devices with which to bring interpretation to an end, but rather devices with which to point to possible directions and their consequences, realizing that the fingerposts may well be misleading". In the same vein, urban experiments and living labs produce new possibilities and may lend new kinds of wriggle rooms for urban planners today, owing more to New Public Governance than to science. The paper discusses how the experimental spaces of living labs are imagined and exploited, and how anthropologists may carve out opportunities for participation and participant observation in collaborations around urban living labs.