Learning to Retrofit in Living Laboratories

James Evans

The laboratory is the place

where things that are

uncommon and unproven are

tested: a learning process by definition.

- Paolo Soleri, 2002

Infrastructure transitions require

new and effective forms of

urban knowledge. - Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin, 2009

BUT - who is involved and why?- how are experiments staged? - how is learning and scaling supposed to occur?

‘Implementation Platforms’

CITIES UNIVERSITIES BUSINESSES

staging experiments

• Cost

• Risk

• Control

• ‘learning to learn’ - soft versus hard learning

• ethos of experimentation

• interaction between technological and social aspects

• Infrastructure waiting for a user

• Test-bed

• Data on a memory stick

research infrastructure and transition

‘modestly nudging reality’

• Testing versus experimenting?

‘many of the technologies are not our own technologies anyway, they’re not things we want to test.... so really we are testing to see what the problems of the real world are rather than testing particular systems’

• learning and transition

• politics of different research assemblages