The spatial dynamics of urban experimentation: a novel framework for recontextualisation across places

Globally, cities are confronted with multifaceted climate mitigation and adaptation challenges, requiring experimentation with new socio-technical systems to accelerate sustainability transitions and enhance resilience. An emerging urban governance approach centred on experimentation—employed to test socio-technical innovations and promote learning—has gained traction in scholarship and practice. Research has shown that generalising and aggregating insights from urban experiments play important roles in facilitating their transfer. Utilising geographical lenses, increasing attention has been paid to the significant influence of place on urban experimentation, as well as their diffusion. However, current research lacks an integrated perspective on the relationships between the transfer of experiments and their recontextualisation in new settings. Noting a critical gap in understanding the diverse types of work involved in recontextualising experiments, we propose a heuristic framework based on geography and transitions literature. We explore the utility of this framework by employing original data from multiple case studies of urban sustainability experiments across water and energy domains in Australian cities. Replication, reconfiguration, translocal adaptation, and assemblage are identified as distinct but interrelated recontextualisation work in transferring and adapting experiments across places. Applying the heuristic helps establish that more complex experiments and dissimilar environments entail greater difficulties in transfer. The results provide a deeper understanding of the nuanced mechanisms in standardising and recontextualising experiments with different degrees of sophistication and place-based requirements. The Australian cases contribute a novel body of evidence that broadens the scope of contemporary sustainability experiments research, traditionally rooted in European contexts. • offers heuristic to distinguish four types of work for recontextualising experiment • more complex experiments and dissimilar environments entail more sophisticated work • links standardisation of experiments with the responsiveness of receiving contexts • questions linear view of experiment transfer as diffusion of standardised solutions • offers diagnostic insights to tailor policy support for sustainability experiments