Urban experimentation and bureaucratic urban politics in planning for urban sustainability

This chapter examines the increasing role of experimentation in transforming urban planning toward sustainability and focuses on the planning bureaucracy as a site of such experimentation. We argue that planning bureaucracies, which create representations of urban reality through maps, statistics and models, should be viewed as essential sites of experimentation. Using Copenhagen's planning for urban nature and cycling as case studies, we show how bureaucratic knowledge is often narrow and selective. Producing alternative knowledge within these bureaucracies can nevertheless significantly alter established planning practices. Thus, planning bureaucracies are not just stakeholders in urban experimentation but experimental sites where new knowledge formats and urban representations are tested and modified to address contemporary sustainability challenges better.