Speaker
Description
Introduction
Tactical urbanism complements urban planning by offering creative solutions to urban challenges. Inspired by this concept, street experiments involve intentional, temporary changes in street use, policy, or form to promote people-centric streets. Although such initiatives have been implemented globally (Zhao et al., 2024), they have faced limited success in Hong Kong. Central to this issue is the constrained transformative capacity of key stakeholders—their ability to initiate path-deviant change (Wolfram, 2016). This study focuses on how stakeholders’ transformative capacities—manifested through learning and leadership—influence urban experiment outcomes. Using the case of Healthy Street Lab 2.0, a street experiment led by a grassroots organisation, this study examines why such initiatives have achieved limited impact.
Context
Hong Kong aspires to create vibrant, mixed-use streets, but the government relies on non-governmental actors to provide urban design (Villani & Talamini, 2023). Street experiments in the city are rare and often perceived as radical, constrained by an institutional focus on technocentric planning and neoliberal placemaking, which marginalises community-oriented initiatives. Healthy Street Lab 2.0, the focus of this study, represents the last street experiment in Hong Kong, involving collaboration between the government and a grassroots organisation specialising in co-creative design. This initiative, supported by the city’s transport department, sought to promote community engagement and innovative street design. Despite being well-resourced, the project failed to achieve its intended goals, with most design prototypes discontinued shortly after implementation.
Method
To analyse the Healthy Street Lab 2.0, we developed an analytical framework based on the concepts of transformative capacity (Wolfram, 2016) and transitional capacity (Bertolini, 2020; VanHoose et al., 2022). This “transformation logic” framework identifies two critical elements—learning and leadership—as essential to the success of street experiments. The study employed semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and field observations to understand the roles of key actors and the evolution of the programme. We gathered insights from key stakeholders (n=13), focusing on their motivations, challenges, and reflections, as well as feedback from street experiment users (n=14). We explored how leadership and learning dynamics influenced the experiment’s outcomes and its capacity to foster transformative urban change.
Results
The findings reveal how limited willingness to learn and constrained leadership capacities among key actors curtailed the scope, vision, and impact of the street experiment, ultimately failing its initial objectives. Although the government’s endorsement initially empowered the grassroots organisation to lead a co-creative process, rigid requirements related to safety and public acceptance gradually eroded this leadership. Meanwhile, the government’s dominance over design approvals and its rigid control stifled opportunities to learn from the innovative design process. This lack of openness to experimentation resulted in minimal long-term street design. The findings underscore the role of power differentials and institutional barriers in limiting the transformative potential of street experiments. By prioritising control over experimentation, the government constrained the grassroots organisation’s capacity to lead and undermined the project’s ability to generate change.
Implications
This study highlights the importance of key actors’ capacity and willingness to learn and lead amid institutional barriers. It helps understand the barriers proffered through urban planning norms that influence stakeholder-experiment dynamics. Probing in this direction provides insight into the potential of well-planned street experiments and the transformative momentum lost due to misjudgements of planning conventions. This work contributes to the debate on street transformations by offering insights from an often-overlooked Asian context. Compared to European-American cases, which focus on post-implementation governance issues related to street experiments, this study identified greater barriers from governmental institutions during the pre-implementation phase. This suggests an alternative path toward people-centric street transformations, emphasising a distinct government-citizen dynamic and learning pathway in an Asian context.
References
Bertolini L (2020) From “streets for traffic” to “streets for people”: can street experiments transform urban mobility? Transport Reviews 0(0). Taylor & Francis: 1–20. DOI: 10.1080/01441647.2020.1761907.
VanHoose K, de Gante AR, Bertolini L, et al. (2022) From temporary arrangements to permanent change: Assessing the transitional capacity of city street experiments. Journal of Urban Mobility 2(February). Elsevier Ltd: 100015. DOI: 10.1016/j.urbmob.2022.100015.
Villani C and Talamini G (2023) Failed pedestrian street experiments in high-density urban Asia : A matter of policies ? Journal of Urban Mobility 4(November). Elsevier Ltd: 100069. DOI: 10.1016/j.urbmob.2023.100069.
Wolfram M (2016) Conceptualising urban transformative capacity: A framework for research and policy. Cities 51. Elsevier B.V.: 121–130. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.011.
Zhao J, Sun G and Webster C (2024) Global Street Experiment: A Geospatial Database of Pandemic-induced Street Transitions. Landscape and Urban Planning 242. DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104931.
| Keywords | Urban experimentation; transition; transformative capacity; leadership; learning |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
