Social experiments and the praxis of geographical knowledge production: Emerging architectural practices in urban and regional China

Rethinking the praxis of geographical knowledge production

Geography has played an important role in the articulation of critical perspectives on inequalities, dispossessions, and the decline in qualities of life. However, comparatively limited attempts have been made to envision interventions into realities and possibilities for alternative futures. This issue has recently been reckoned with extensively. In geography, not only is there a persistent utopian impulse in urban and regional research, but the interest in diverse economies, alternative economies, community economies, and do-it-yourself practices in urban and regional contexts has been expanding (Anderson, 2006; Gibson-Graham, 2008; Iveson, 2013). Parallel to academic interest in the social relevance of knowledge, we are witnessing a proliferation of collective experiments, that is, deliberate interventions into real-world contexts to observe whether an anticipated outcome is triggered and what social issues can thus be addressed (Latour, 2001). The ultimate purpose of these efforts is to codify observations into knowledge models that can be applied beyond the immediate context of the experiment. In short, social experiments signal how paradigms of knowledge production are changing from inciting academic debates to provoking substantive interventions, leading to a proliferation of critical knowledge at the practical and everyday levels.

Geographical research has taken note of the proliferation of in-situ experiments and interventions. So far, the lens of social experiment has been most commonly applied to discussions on urban sustainability transitions (Bulkeley and Broto, 2013; Evans, 2011; Marvin and Silver, 2016). To a lesser extent, social experiments have been designed to facilitate the realization of smart cities, encounters with cultural diversity, and high-rise lifestyles (Levenda, 2019; Mayblin et al., 2015; Strebel and Jacobs, 2014). Yet, there is still room for the knowledge produced by a multiplicity of non-academic actors to be incorporated into our horizon of knowing. To make a plea for this agenda, the next section reviews some key theoretical points underlying this praxis. Then, we briefly introduce a number of recent architectural experiments in China. While informed by the theoretical concerns delineated in the second section, this focus on architectural experimentalism has the potential to further enrich inquiry on social experiments, for it highlights: (1) diverse knowledge producers – including the state, corporations, and other institutionalized actors such as NGOs, but also involving grassroots actors such as independent architects, intellectuals, volunteers, local people, etc.; (2) diverse rationalities – beyond the orientation toward sustainability and the built environment, but also diverse forms of social progress and collective goods; and (3) diverse socio-economic relations – beyond those based on technical or market rationality, but also involving many based on extra-market and non-economic logics. In sum, these experiments pay close attention to the diversity of people's everyday lives, while social and material innovations are evaluated in line with people's actual needs, thus expanding sources of learning and knowledge.

Ultimately, we expect that ongoing theoretical debates and empirical research will affirm the view that expert knowledge is no longer adequate to cope with the uncertainties and challenges brought by increasingly complex cultural, political, and environmental configurations (Kullman, 2013). Socially distributed expertise, which is generated from situated practices and by addressing particular social problems, needs to be added to the enterprise of knowledge. Meanwhile, situated experiments and interventions entail the involvement of a diverse array of actors and highly networked knowledge creation and application, putting into question the cognitive/discursive monopoly of a handful of professional academics. To sum up, as knowledge production moves towards more collective, collaborative, transboundary, and experimental modes, an academic agenda that places the production of expertise and learning in vernacular, everyday contexts at the forefront of research and theorization is urgently needed.

Knowledge production through a social experiment

Our ongoing research is informed by three theoretical issues that the geographical study of experiments has highlighted thus far. Firstly, experiments are driven by rationalities, discourses, and provocations. As Karvonen and van Heur (2014) point out, social experiments are commonly encoded by a change orientation, and are hence aspiration-led and vision-oriented, serving the purpose of exploring alternative and better futures. The production of knowledge in urban and regional experiments is essentially a situated task, dedicated to addressing problems and predicaments in specific settings (Strebel and Jacobs, 2014). They do not necessarily transcend the material conditions and constraints in the present, as Coleman (2013) argues with reference to the utopian thinking of Henri Lefebvre. However, they are driven by the belief that the components of a socio-technical system can be re-steered to work in alternative ways, so that radical novelty can be generated, and normative aims achieved.

Secondly, different aspects of social worlds are mobilized to interact with each other and test the hypotheses underlying an experiment. The notion of social learning is described as a loop between belief systems and interpretive frameworks, on the one hand, and the material conditions, social dynamics, and situated practices set in motion by experiments, on the other hand (Vergragt and Brown, 2007). This notion signals a commitment to establishing a circuit or loop between learning and doing, between theory and praxis. This is markedly different from research approaches which presume that existing knowledge is imposed from the top down to act on places in question or research practices that culminate in a one-off distillation of knowledge from a pre-given case. Instead, in-situ experiments emphasize the instability of knowledge, its temporality and evolution, and its diffusion within the fabrics of situated practices.

Finally, knowledge production in social experiments is inherently recursive. Hence, we should not only pay attention to results and outcomes that are congruent with the hypotheses and assumptions of experiments, but also the unexpected deviations, noises, and surprises. Laboratory theory suggests that the purpose of controlling the parameters and boundaries of experiments is to manage, reduce, or even inhibit the occurrence of ‘surprises’ that exceed the epistemic space dictated by the design of the experiment, so as to ensure the rigour and broad applicability of knowledge models (Gross, 2010). However, in a real-world context, the control of contingencies and uncertainties risks masking the complexities of social systems, the co-variations among different variables, and the difficulty of replicating controlled and bounded laboratory conditions (Cook et al., 2004). As a result, the study of social experiments requires a constant openness to, and vigilance toward, contingencies and surprises. Noises and surprises, while certainly causing distraction from a desired outcome, reveal how relations among parameters can be adjusted, or at a more fundamental level, how theories and assumptions underlying the experiment should be radically rethought and revised (Gross, 2010). Only by continually modifying or establishing anew the designs of experiments can knowledge be refreshed on an ongoing basis, and potential negative externalities of interventions be minimized, should knowledge models derived from experiments be applied widely.

Architecture experiments in China

This section briefly introduces our ongoing research on recent architectural experiments in China. Our first research project examines the revival of cultural identities in rural China through architectural interventions. Rural China has attracted considerable policy and public attention since rural areas have suffered from the degeneration of material conditions, juxtaposed with the marginalization of vernacular cultures vis-à-vis rapid urbanization. Over the past two decades, the state and also a broad array of grassroots actors have collaborated in myriad efforts to intervene in declining rural communities, and the rationale is to test how changes in the material experiences of inhabitation can translate into social and cultural revival (Lu and Qian, 2020; Qian and Lu, 2022a). In this regard, architectural experiments provide a lens to observe how architecture promotes recursive and ongoing learning about rural change. We have in particular examined the recursive nature of an experiment, that is, how the horizon of learning can be broadened vis-à-vis unanticipated ‘noises’ and aberrations, expressed in new forms of inequalities, cultural alienation, and social segregation (Qian and Lu, 2022a).

Our second research project is on the politics of everyday life and how architectural experiments can be used to enhance the qualities and dignities of living. In Shanghai, improved experiences of inhabitation through architectural designs and renovation of highly crowded and dilapidated housing addressed residents’ loss of a sense of dignity. In a commercial resort in Hebei, architectural designs are appropriated by users of space to add to cultural meanings and spiritual fullness of everyday life, amidst the alienation, rationalization, and homogenization caused by rapid urbanization. Although the project is overseen by a commercial developer, rationalities underlying it have moved beyond the centrality of capital and accumulation and are instead encoded by alternatives logics and sensibilities (Qian and Lu, 2022b). Indeed, in contemporary China, more and more architects attempt to contribute to social betterment by applying designs to every day, non-spectacular spaces at the community level, such as schools, social centres, facilities for sports and play, libraries, art galleries, etc., to assist people's pursuit of dwelling and poetic inhabitancy.

Finally, the third project will look at how architectural experiments engage in clean energy, sustainability, and the reduction of environmental footprints. The construction and operation of the built environment are accountable for 47% of annual global carbon emissions (GlobalABC, 2021). In light of this, manifold experimental concepts and initiatives have been proposed, such as Building Integrated Photovoltaic, (nearly) zero carbon building, biomimetic building, etc. However, in contrast to civil engineering and construction management science, our take on architecture does not see it just as an aggregate of fixed technical properties that translate into reduced emissions in unilinear and mechanical ways. Rather, experiments are inserted into routines of everyday life, the socio-economic relations constituting them, and people's subjectivities. Ultimately, whether new material and technical conditions can nurture pro-environment behaviours and lifestyles – the central question for these experiments – is contingent on social, cultural, and political contexts and with implications for issues of environmental justice, eco-politics, governance, cultural consciousness, etc.

To sum up, this research agenda resonates with geographers’ passion for the role of geographical knowledge in envisioning and actualizing alternative worlds. In a different vein from research efforts that detect contexts in which alternative economies or social formations emerge naturally, the epistemology of experiment holds that progress and alternative worlds can be actively ‘engineered’ and experimented. Such experimental knowledge needs to occupy a more central place in critical and progressive geographies, so as to inform geographers’ involvements in activism, social innovations, and policy-making. While urban laboratories and experiments already make up an established topic in urban and economic geographies, these studies have thus far focused on interventions into technical infrastructures to usher in a sustainability transition, usually through the works of institutional actors such as the state and corporations. The lens of an experiment, however, has rarely been applied to other projects and rationalities of social betterment, and extant studies have been relatively vague about how experiments can move beyond the logics of capital and the market. By taking into account plural knowledge producers, diverse rationalities underlying proliferating interventions, and socio-economic relations beyond the market, our research agenda will enrich the analytical framework on situated experiments in real-world contexts, and ultimately the social relevance of knowledge production processes.