Learning for transitions: An experiential learning strategy for urban experiments

Urban experimentation has been increasingly applied as an urban development tool for finding new ways to face grand societal challenges, as they unfold in cities. Experiments might trigger systemic change, since they differ conceptually from conventional urban development, as they can be radical in ambition, limited in scope, and place emphasis on learning from real-world interventions. However, while there seems to be a common understanding of the importance of learning through urban experiments, there seems to remain a lack of, or unclarity on, learning and reflectivity in the practice of urban experimentation. This paper aims to provide principles for developing more explicit, testable, and improvable learning strategies in urban experimentation by addressing the following question: How to foster learning for transitions through urban experiments? For this, insights from transition studies and experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984) were used, resulting in a synthesized strategy for learning for transitions through experimentation.