Learning: the missing link between urban experimentation and transformation. Professor James Evans, University of Manchester, 24 May 2023 (på engelska)

URBAN ARENA TALK AND ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

’Learning: the missing link between urban experimentation and transformation’

Professor James Evans, University of Manchester

LUX Aula, Helgonavägen 3, Lund

Wednesday, 24 May 2023, 15:00-16:30

Cities have been experimenting, trialling, piloting and demonstrating new solutions to a range of urban challenges for a number of decades now. Many have been shown to work, with data and positive evaluations to back them up. More recently effort and money has been expended scaling up, rolling out and selling these solutions, focusing heavily on implementation rather than innovation. In this talk, I argue that these efforts have largely failed as they are based upon an inappropriate model of commercial innovation that does not fit the way cities work. Experimentation is about articulating solutions into place, a process that in turn can be used to drive organisational change. Learning is at the heart of this. When organisations learn how to do things differently, urban transformation follows. Sadly, organisational change is not considered part of the innovation cycle, and is a messy and non-linear process that resists simple measurement and evaluation. The talk concludes by posing ways to capture this elusive subject.

The lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion with Sara Brorström (Gothenburg University) and Jonas Bylund (KTH Royal Institute of Technology).

James Evans is a Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester who studies how cities learn to become more sustainable. He has conducted foundational work on place-based methodologies including urban living labs and walking interviews, and has led large international and interdisciplinary research projects addressing sustainable urban governance. He currently directs the Manchester Urban Institute and is working on the concept of urban innovation.

Sara Brorström is Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg where she engages in research projects on public management, strategy and sustainability. Jonas Bylund is a researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology where he conducts research on processes of change in cities. Sara and Jonas collaborate on the Formas project ‘TRANS-LEARN: Ecosystems of Learning for Urban Sustainability Transformations’ (2021-2025). 

This event is sponsored by the Urban Arena.