Experimentology: How to spot an urban experiment

This paper presents a novel and multi-disciplinary and diverse collaborative development of a systematic ontology of urban plans, programmes and projects that propose to be experimental. We show ongoing work that spans a range of international case studies of urban experiments and review the initiator of the experiment, the context, scale, financing, governance, decision-making, stakeholders alongside the substantive classification for neighbourhoods, buildings, and the spaces in-between. In contrast to existing academic typologies of urban experiments, this classification is both dynamic and emergent, based on data collected from a broad range of past and current planning interventions that have been described in some form as ‘experimental’. Work presented is created and coded using Protégé (an open-source online ontology editor) and based on the underlying characteristics of real-world case study projects. We apply a resource description framework (RDF) and uniform resource identifiers (URIs), to create machine readable data suitable for organising, sorting, and searching within an emerging database of experimental urban projects. The developing project database is available for http referencing, wider machine processing and automated large language models (LLMs).

The coding uses Web Ontology Language (OWL) via Protégé, to allow for improved visualisation of project data, including data based upon user-defined queries ‘and/or modelling’ via the semantic web. The creation and editing have been undertaken by lay practitioners and expert planning professionals, and we present preliminary work resulting from this. Our hope is that this can increase the utility and application of a shared experimental urbanism project database covering different scales, locations, organisations and budgets, supporting the use of linked data based on open data principles. This digital commons approach contributes to precisely defining the boundaries and parameters of what ‘experimental’ means in relation to the urban.