Lecture #1 Luca BERTOLINI "Urban experimentation as prefigurative politics? City streets, for example"

Three key critiques question the potential of urban experimentation to trigger transformative change in cities. First is the inability of experiments to activate radically alternative imaginaries of the urban future. Second is the lack of impact beyond the place and time of the experiment. Third is the denial of the intrinsically political nature of urban experimentation and urban change. In this talk, I will first reflect on the relevance of these critiques and contend that they are intimately related. Next, I will suggest that the concept and practices of performative politics might provide a fruitful reference to explore ways to address the critiques and rethink urban experimentation to increase its transformative potential. Throughout the argumentation, I will use the case of current, burgeoning experiments with alternative uses, regulations and designs of city streets – ‘from streets for traffic to streets for people’ - as illustration.

BIO

Luca Bertolini is a professor of urban planning at the University of Amsterdam. His research and teaching focus on the integration of transport and urban planning for humane, sustainable and just cities, concepts and practices to enable transformative urban and mobility change, and ways of enhancing collaboration across different academic disciplines and between academia and society. 

Luca has extensively published on among more Transit Oriented Development, multimodal planning, planning for accessibility, and more recently on transitions and experiments in urban mobility and public space. His contributions have been often used in planning practice, as in the case of the ’node-place’ model for the integrated planning of stations and their surrounding areas.

Part of the 2022/23 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'moving cities forward, leaving no one behind. toward fair & sustainable transitions'.

Organised by Brussels Centre for Urban Studies