Keeping the game alive, or prefigurative urban experiments as 'pragmatic wandering'

Urban experiments have drawn increasing attention as a potential pathway to more democratic, inclusive and sustainable forms of urban governance and development. Research on these experimental spaces and practices often draw on transition studies, including the multi-level perspective and the framework of experimental niches, regimes and landscapes. This paradigm reads innovations or experiments as succeeding either by trying to 'win' by providing better or more optimized alternatives to the mainstream, or by trying to shift the terms of mainstream systems and structures to better accommodate them. In order to be successful, (social) innovations are understood as either trying to 'play the game' or trying to 'change the rules of the game,' and success is understood as scaling beyond the niche and becoming mainstreamed at regime or landscape level. Seeing urban experiments instead through a prefigurative lens reveals is that the real enduring aim is to 'keep the game alive': since prefigurative practice collapses ends and means into a continuous, provisional, experimental *experience* of alternative realities, 'success' may look like a continuation of the struggle rather than its resolution. <br/><br/>Based on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a prefigurative urban experiment in Rotterdam, this paper follows the project's evolution, tensions and internal and external conflicts as they attempt to 'keep the game alive' and prolong their efforts to prefigure alternatives. Their insistence on collaborative, experimental decision-making exists in tension with the precarious reality of a short-term space, funding conditions and substantial developments in the neighborhood. This necessitates an ongoing process of negotiation and compromise, or what one of the founders calls 'meandering pragmatically', in order to keep this niche alive for longer. This reading challenges the solutionist and outcome-oriented perspective of much literature on social innovation, demonstrating that conflicts are not something to be 'overcome' in order to achieve a stable, mainstream position beyond the niche; rather, conflict and the struggle to keep the niche alive are intertwined with the experience of ongoing experimental actions and the concrete utopia contained within them.