Experimenting with community power: spatial and participatory politics in the Uptown Ecoinnovation District

Achieving sustainable and equitable cities requires new ways of planning development. To address this, urban governance “experiments” are on the rise worldwide. Because they purport to innovate novel governance processes in small districts (e.g. neighborhoods, campuses), these initiatives are often framed as uniquely capable of generating participatory planning processes that empower community-driven development. Through a qualitative case study of the Uptown EcoInnovation District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this article interrogates how the place-based nature of experiments shapes their potential to empower community development control. The main contribution is a conceptual framework that analyzes community development control as a product of relationships between spatial politics (i.e. contestations surrounding place meanings, governance scales, and material spaces) and participatory politics (i.e. contestations concerning who participates in planning, how, and why) fostered by experiments. Using this framework, the article analyzes how the Uptown EcoInnovation District shapes the ability of regional actors to influence three aspects of development: discourses, decision-making, and investment. The analysis illustrates that the local embeddedness of experiments does not a priori empower local community-driven planning. Rather, it is when experiments build connections across multi-scalar networks that they are better able to empower community members to direct and benefit from development.