Urban planning experiments and socially innovative urban governance: insights from the Barcelona Superblocks

Today, urban experimentation has become a widespread practice in city planning. The urgency of testing and accelerating urban transformations in the context of socio-ecological crises has fuelled a renewed wave of planning experiments, turning the ‘experimental city’ into a highly contested terrain. This paper examines the under-researched question of whether experimental designs can function as spaces for grassroots engagement and empowerment. Drawing on literature on social innovation and urban governance, it uses the concept of bottom-linked governance to analyse how state and civil society actors interact through joint governance and mutual learning, reshaping social relations toward greater empowerment while accommodating conflict and contestation.Empirically, the paper investigates how citizens’ demands and practices were integrated in three Superblock-green axis experiments in Barcelona, assessing their implications for grassroots empowerment and democratic legitimacy. The analysis highlights three key aspects: (a) how processes of experimentation can lead to forms of bottom-linked governance through negotiation and consolidation of the experiment; (b) the capacity of experimental practices to build on local grassroots demands and prefigurative initiatives; and (c) how the legitimacy of experiments largely depends on legal and political structures that take place at wider scales.