NORD-URB-EXP: Experimentation and Learning about Street Space for Just Transitions to Post-Car Nordic Cities
The NORD-URB-EXP project will develop cutting-edge research on experimentation as an urban planning paradigm, with emphasis on streets and public spaces. A key challenge under UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 is reducing the social injustice and environmental externalities caused by the dominance of private car use, which from a utopian perspective includes possible transitions towards 'post-car' cities.
This project will advance debate on temporary interventions to transform streets and public spaces, that seek to provide more space for people and public life, rather than cars and traffic. The conditions under which small-scale, time-limited experiments may contribute to longer-term transformative change remains a research gap. The COVID-19 pandemic saw street space experimentation emerge as a prominent policy response, yet there is a need to unpack narratives regarding the promise of 'tactical urbanism' from the perspectives of decision-making processes, power asymmetries, and citizen participation. Interrogating these questions will be especially productive through cross-regional comparison of infrastructural experimentation in different Nordic cities, which is still limited in the literature. The aim of NORD-URB-EXP is to understand how multi-actor learning processes shape the long-term impacts of experiments and their contribution to socially just transitions towards post-car cities, using Nordic cities as reference cases.