Chain reactions: can experimental urbanism provide the formula for productive, place-based, change?

In this commentary, we revisit our previous viewpoint (Varna and Oswell, 2021) and explain how our work has progressed since it was published. The commentary is structured into three sections. In the first, we revisit our original propositions to allow us to critically reflect on them. In the second, we ground our reflective practice within a theoretical context and set out an emerging methodology to trial action research and experiments in urbanism. The third section sets out a strategy for deployment of this methodology in active processes of experimental urbanism in a mix of specific ‘left-behind’ neighbourhoods in northeast England. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .