1 Introduction

Local action in cities is considered a driver of innovation and transformation, especially when this local action takes the form of experimentation (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Ehnert 2023; van der Heijden 2023). Experimentation embodies a governance approach to policymaking, which has gained traction as the main response mode to the climate governance regime over the past three decades (Bulkeley 2023). In line with literature on reflexive governance, adaptive governance, and policy innovations, experimentation promises to deliver novel solutions to complex or wicked problems through the logic of testing for the most effective and suitable policies (ibid.; Hildén et al. 2017; Huitema et al. 2018). Experiments produce policy-relevant evidence and learning by demonstrating what is possible on the ground, particularly when policy stakes are high but scientific uncertainties remain. By empowering the local level in this way, they can fill in the gap of missing policy action by nation-states and ultimately lead to policy change. This change may be instigated incrementally by changing social practices or by scaling successful outcomes, potentially leading to disruptive or radical transformations (Bulkeley 2023).

Whereas the focus of urban experiments has been on sustainability and climate change mitigation, nowadays, cities increasingly focus on resilience, driven by the goal to adapt to climate change and deal with the varieties of perceived urban crises (Meerow et al. 2019). At the city level, resilience describes the ability of an urban system to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit future adaptive capacity (Meerow et al. 2016). The Resilient City Network (RCN, formerly 100 Resilient Cities), is a prominent example of cities using resilience as a guiding paradigm for emerging urban agendas (Borie et al. 2019). Cities developed resilience strategies as policy imaginaries for the future that include an experimental approach in different areas. They engage in local, place-based policy action through pilots, demonstrations, and living labs to find ways how to increase urban resilience successfully. For example, in Panama City and Paris, citizens can define temporary, small-scale interventions to transform public spaces in their neighbourhoods, including cycle lanes, recreational spaces, green micro-areas, or street furniture, which are piloted and potentially maintained and scaled. The Hague has established a “Debt Lab” comprising private and public partners, which work together to develop, pilot, and evaluate solutions for debt and poverty.

Resilience experiments have not yet been studied systematically at the city level, although resilience and experiments are confronted with strikingly similar critiques in the literature on social justice and equity. Instead of transforming the status quo, several scholars argue that resilience policies achieve quite the contrary by perpetuating unjust structures and power relations as a rather apolitical concept (Capano and Woo 2017; Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019). Regarding experiments, authors also stress that they can perpetuate the status quo, reinforce patterns of inequality and reproduce socially unjust urban realities (Bulkeley et al. 2015; Hildén et al. 2017; Smeds and Acuto 2018). Even if experiments succeed, it remains unclear how to use the learnings to proliferate interventions to different urban contexts within, across, and beyond cities (Ehnert 2023; Kern 2023). Therefore, the instrumental value of experiments is also increasingly contested (Bulkeley 2023). Scholars acknowledge that urban resilience, predominantly shaped by ideas and practices from the Global North, raises particular concerns for social justice and equity when applied in the Global South, where levels of inequality are often high (Borie et al. 2019; Ziervogel et al. 2017). However, there remains a substantial research gap regarding comparative studies on resilience policies in Global South and North cities, with the few existing studies focusing on two-case comparisons (e.g., Krishnan et al. 2023; Simon et al. 2022).

Against this background, this paper asks: What role does social justice play in the rationales and narratives of resilience experiments in Global South and Global North cities? To address this inquiry, I examine planned resilience experiments depicted in RCN policy documents from 30 cities across the Global South and North, considering their content and narratives. First, I outline the discourses on resilience and experimentation in the literature, including social justice. Subsequently, I present the RCN and my methodological approach. I integrate Fraser’s (2005) understanding of distributive, recognitional, and representative justice with the urban resilience framework proposed by Meerow et al. (2016). Based on this analysis, I compare the results to explore emerging patterns in the role given to social justice in urban experimentation across cities in the Global South and North. Finally, I close with a discussion and concluding remarks on the implications of these findings for the novel field of urban resilience experiments.

2 The emerging field of urban resilience experiments

2.1 Urban experimentation and urban resilience

A rich, interdisciplinary body of literature has developed around the topic of urban experimentation (see Ehnert 2023). From the perspective of transition and innovation studies, experiments originating in protected spaces (so-called niches) lead to urban transformations in policies and practices through spatial and temporal expansion and diffusion (see e.g., Kemp et al. 1998). Governance scholars, mainly with backgrounds in urban studies and geography, emphasise the inherent situatedness and contingency of experiments by acknowledging the messiness, fuzziness, and uncertainty of the urban (Karvonen 2018; Karvonen et al. 2013). In this view, the overarching goal to instigate change combined with the spatiality of urban experimentation as a form of placemaking results in an inherent, dualistic tension between contextualisation and generalisation. In other words, the scaling of experiments as a linear mechanism contrasts with the specificity of the local context and actors involved in experimental sites (van der Heijden 2023). Scholars draw attention, therefore, to the politics of experimentation, including underlying interests, values, and imaginaries (see Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Karvonen et al. 2013). This attention is crucial because experiments not only emerge bottom-up through niches but are also conducted by city administrations, which act as enablers (Bulkeley and Kern 2006). In political ecology, which positions urban experimentation in the context of resilience, experiments represent the spaces where necessary adaptations for resilience occur, and related governance takes place on the ground (Evans 2011).

The notion of resilience as used in political ecology originated in ecology as a concept to measure how far systems withstand external disturbances by ‘bouncing back’ or ‘forward’ while retaining the same function and identity (Carpenter et al. 2001; Folke 2006; Holling 1973). Central characteristics of resilience include, for example, the degree to which a system is capable of self-organisation and the degree to which a system expresses a capacity for learning and adaptation (Carpenter et al. 2001; Folke 2006). Increasingly applied to social-ecological systems, defined as interlinked systems of human activity and nature (Berkes et al. 2003), resilience has found its way into research on cities, which emblematically stand for social-ecological or socio-technical systems (Meerow et al. 2016). Meerow and colleagues (ibid., p. 39) define urban resilience therefore as “[…] the ability of an urban system and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit future adaptive capacity”. The resilience paradigm has introduced interpretations of an originally rather technically understood approach to the policy discourse on mainly climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (Borie et al. 2019). As the concept is rather broad and used across multiple disciplines and practitioner fields, it is open to divergent interpretations. This conceptual broadness allows, on the one hand, for discursive exchange of usually distant disciplinary or practitioner groups. On the other hand, resilience understandings are dependent on how meaning is shaped in specific urban settings (ibid.). The contextualised resilience understanding is revealed by the framing of content and justifying narratives of experimental interventions. In this perspective, a narrative can be understood as a medium to achieve a coherent notion in the sense of a socio-ecological or socio-technical imaginary (ibid.).

Based on the experimentation and resilience literature, I define urban resilience experiments as purposeful interventions in the urban space to advance socio-ecological and socio-technical resilience, dependent on the contextualised resilience understanding, through a learning-by-doing approach with the aim to disseminate results in time and/or space.

2.2 Social justice in urban experimentation and resilience

Resilience in the city is usually highly unequal in the sense that hazardous events affect low-income and minority communities disproportionately (Meerow et al. 2019). Social injustice and inequalities are the norm in the urban political and socio-economic landscape that comprises privileged and marginalised groups (Beilin and Wilkinson 2015). Many scholars are sceptical about whether the resilience paradigm can advance social transformation in the sense of disrupting entrenched, structural inequalities or rather perpetuates dysfunctional, unjust urban systems (Béné et al. 2018; Fainstein 2015, 2018; Gillard 2016; Meerow et al. 2016). In this view, the resilience literature pays insufficient attention to justice and equity and uses resilience as an apolitical paradigm, maintaining the overall status quo (Capano and Woo 2017; Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019). The framing of narratives around resilience can either bring value conflicts to the forefront that can be used for integrated policy and democratic decision-making, or it can obscure these conflicts, potentially reinforcing them (Leitner et al. 2018). Authors caution that the element of self-organisation can be used for the political justification to devolve responsibility from the state to individuals and ambiguously defined communities to help themselves (Paschen and Beilin 2015). Even though resilience can be understood as transformative (bouncing forward), in politics and public policy, resilience has been used largely in a techno-scientific perspective as a means to counter risks (Beilin and Wilkinson 2015). Meerow et al. (2016) emphasise that resilience is a ‘malleable’ concept that will inevitably evoke a contested process when applied in the city context through competing power dynamics, rationales, and potential trade-offs across spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, they condensed the growing body of critical literature into the framework of the “5 W’s”: whose urban resilience is prioritised, against what, when, where, and why (ibid.).

These questions are equally relevant for experiments. Which challenge is tackled in which spatial and temporal context through experimentation indicates the contribution of this approach to future policy-making (Hildén et al. 2017). While experiments can tailor adaptation options to the specific city context, the framing can uphold the economic, infrastructural, and political status quo and leave out social justice or equitable development (Chu 2016; Hildén et al. 2017). Additionally, the inherent tension between abstract, usually scientifically informed, knowledge and place-specific, ideographic, knowledge can lead to the testing of existing forms of knowledge and technology instead of processes of contextualised learning and adaptation (Evans 2011). Bound in time and space, experiments in general may be preferred over long-term, large-scale projects because of their short-term character and associated manageability (Ehnert 2023). Similar to resilience, experimentation is criticised for the potential to reinforce patterns of inequality by focusing on affluent groups instead of vulnerable or marginalised ones (Bulkeley et al. 2015; Smeds and Acuto 2018). Who is involved in the experimental design is crucial in the policy approach that draws on transdisciplinarity and the involvement of diverse actors (Hildén et al. 2017; Bulkeley 2023). Through this focus, experiments can, however, result in a focus on public-private partnerships or the privatisation of urban infrastructures (Bulkeley et al. 2014). In general, urban socio-technical and socio-ecological configurations prove to be rather resistant against an experimental approach because of path dependencies, e.g., through power relations, administrative silo thinking, missing sectoral integration, or the obduracy of material infrastructures (Bulkeley et al. 2014). Evaluation should be an integral part in the experimental design to facilitate reflexive governance and prevent a continuation of the overall status quo (Hildén et al. 2017). Even though learning is considered the driving force for the temporal as well as spatial diffusion or the scaling of experiments, whether and how this learning takes place is underexplored (Ehnert 2023).

The critiques highlight the importance of who is addressed by and involved in an experimental policy approach that aims to enhance resilience in a meaningful and socially just manner. Analytically, scholars in the field of climate justice often follow the social justice understanding of Nancy Fraser (see e.g., Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019; Smaal et al. 2021). Fraser (2005) differentiates three dimensions of social justice, namely redistribution, recognition, and representation. In her understanding, social justice means parity of participation in social life, which should be supported by social and institutional arrangements. Obstacles to this participation as equal peers can come from material maldistribution, selective cultural appreciation of specific groups, i.e., status inequality, and the non-membership in established decision rules. These dimensions are linked to an economic, cultural, and political sphere of justice (ibid.). They are ideal types, which are often difficult to separate neatly in empirical studies, particularly regarding the cultural sphere (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019; Smaal et al. 2021). Fraser also highlights the importance of how social justice is transposed into policy and practice. This procedural aspect is equally recognised by important theoretical contributions to social justice (e.g., Schlosberg 2004) and empirical applications to urban resilience (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019; Meerow et al. 2019).

Empirical findings have shown that resilience has been aligned with a neoliberal agenda (Fainstein 2018), was not very participatory or inclusive in implementation efforts (Aldunce et al. 2016) and has not led to more social equality in single cities (Archer and Dodman 2015). In one of the few studies comparing (single) Global South and North cities, Krishnan et al. (2023) find comparatively less policy integration and a stronger focus on short-term feasibility in the studied Global South city. The framing around tangible results with visible near-term, mainly economic, benefits is also a finding for experimentation in the Global South (Chu 2016). But Global South and North cities also share similarities in studies, such as disconnected multi-level governance, a focus on incremental change, and institutional inertia, in the Global North because of overregulation, in the Global South because of capacity gaps (ibid.; Simon et al. 2022). Incrementalism and multi-level gridlocks open space for experimental action, as observed in the Global South (Chu 2016; Simon et al. 2022). Global South cities use resources and capacities by international actors strategically and draw on civil society and private actors to facilitate and legitimise experiments (Chu 2016). The extent to which social justice considerations play a role is inconclusive for the Global South and North alike (Simon et al. 2022). However, in a recent study on the RCN (Kochskämper et al. 2024), my colleagues and I found that resilience strategies of Global South cities were more advanced in their potential for transformative adaptation, which might be conducive to social justice. Moreover, Global North cities also struggle with political support from the national level and financial and human resources (Anguelovski and Carmin 2011). Therefore, I expect no or small variation in the role of social justice in resilience experiments of Global South and North cities.

3 Empirical context: The Resilient Cities Network

100 Resilient Cities (100RC) was a city network funded by the Rockefeller Foundation between 2013 and 2019, which re-emerged in 2020 as the Resilient City Network (RCN). The initiative supports selected cities around the globe in overcoming urban challenges. Cities had to undergo a competitive application process to be admitted to the network in three consecutive rounds of city uptakes or ‘generations’. Criteria for selection were defined rather broadly as the demonstration of capacities for resilience building and a recent catalyst for change (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019). 100 cities (currently 98 in the RCN) from 46 countries were selected, with 50 from the Global South and North. Apart from the prestige of being in an exclusive city network and the opportunity for inter-city knowledge exchange, the capacity-building and financial support of roughly 1 million dollars per city attracted cities to join 100RC (ibid.). Central elements were a Chief Resilience Officer position, an advisor to the city mayor aiming to mainstream resilience within the city administration, and the development and implementation of a resilience strategy. The strategies were envisioned as “living documents” that gather city strategies under a shared resilience framework to foster integrative governance (ibid., p. 650). For this aim, 100RC established its own resilience definition, which is broader in comparison to other city networks, encompassing social, economic, and physical resilience (Haupt and Coppola 2019), and includes both ‘bouncing back’ and ‘bouncing forward’: “The capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience” (100 Resilient Cities, cited in Taylor et al. 2021, p. 4). Shocks refer to sudden, disruptive events, while stresses denote constant or creeping challenges and vulnerabilities. Partaking cities were encouraged to develop their resilience strategy based on this definition, identifying the most urgent future shocks and stresses and developing or listing related policy actions to tackle them. A city resilience index, developed by an international consultancy, served as an auxiliary tool for this assessment. The index comprises categories relating to social justice, such as empowering a broad range of stakeholders, promoting cohesive and engaged communities, and ensuring social stability, security, and justice, whereby Fitzgibbons and Mitchell (2019) stress that the latter exclusively refers to legal and criminal justice. Moreover, the engagement of a diverse stakeholder pool and citizens was envisaged to deliver inclusive strategy development and implementation processes (Taylor et al. 2021).

Studies on the network indicate that social equity and justice are underrepresented in the policy documents that outline resilience pathways (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019; Meerow et al. 2019). Moreover, scholars critically interpret the broad thematic application of resilience beyond climate change adaptation and disaster risk, and the use of the term “grow” as hinting towards an underlying neoliberal resilience understanding (Taylor et al. 2021). Nevertheless, the network was the first to incorporate social issues under the resilience umbrella and to incentivise their consideration, which has led, for example, 30 of the cities to identify most stresses in a societal dimension, such as social inequality or lack of affordable housing (Kochskämper et al. 2024).

4 Methods

The RCN strategies represent central policy imaginaries of urban resilience. Despite the international campaign “Making Cities Resilient” by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the introduction of resilience to the agenda of other city networks, 100RC has been identified as the “largest coordinated effort at implementing resilience thinking into city planning processes internationally” (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019, p. 648). The common definition and resilience assessment framework that cities had to use for their strategy development process, steered by the network, provided incentives to extend resilience to issues of social justice and equity (Meerow et al. 2019). Therefore, strategic city action in the RCN/100RC characterises a rich empirical context to study the extent to which social justice is part of content and narratives of resilience experiments. In the mentioned recent study (Kochskämper et al. 2024), we found in a sample of resilience strategies (N = 30) from the Global South and North, which were published between 2016 and 2020, experimentation as a small part of planned actions in the Global South and North alike (N = 120 of in total 1200 actions). In a stratified random strategy, we selected 10 cities in each city generation, representing the five predefined RCN regions: Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America. Through this strategy, we aimed to achieve a broad representation of diverse cities in our sample. To qualify for experimentation, the actions had to be presented as a pilot that would test a policy action before further implementation, e.g., institutionalisation or spatial roll-out. For the current study, I reassessed the actions and excluded those that did not strictly fall into this category, resulting in 112 experimental actions in 29 cities (see Fig. 1; appendix I).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Case study cities selected from the RCN/100RC (Kochskämper et al. 2024)

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To analyse the content and narratives in experimental actions for resilience, I combine the “5 W’s” of Meerow et al. (2016), the social justice understanding of Fraser (2005), and a procedural, design aspect (see Table 1; appendix II–IV). The questions of ‘what’, pertaining to the theme of the experiment; ‘where’, concerning the scale of test sites; and ‘when’, focusing on short-term or long-term challenges, outline the setting of resilience experiments by delineating them in the urban space and situating them in time. Together with the addressed actor group (‘who’), I apply Fraser’s social justice dimensions of recognition and redistribution, as justifying narratives for experiments (‘why’) to identify agency. To assess recognition, a dimension hard to measure empirically in policy documents, I follow Smaal et al. (2021), who trace policy documents for value patterns and signs of empowerment. I translate this approach to the acknowledgment of a social dimension as the main justifying narrative of experimental actions. Fraser’s redistribution dimension encompasses economic and material aspects, which I broaden to include spatial and knowledge redistribution. Fraser’s dimension of representation entails past or future involvement of the groups addressed by the resilience experiment. Therefore, it fits seamlessly into a procedural, design aspect or the ‘how’, i.e. the way a resilience experiment is conducted. The design is further comprised by the type of implementation partner in different urban sectors and at different governance levels, intentions of monitoring as a deliberate learning mechanism, and planned scaling as a form of dissemination. I coded the identified experimental actions through qualitative content analysis according to presence or absence of the categories for analysis (see appendix II–IV for coding examples). Engaging in a mixed-methods approach, the result section shows the aggregated findings in the form of descriptive statistics.

Table 1 Categories for analysing resilience experiments regarding social justice
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5 Results: Social justice in urban resilience experiments

5.1 Setting of resilience experiments

Thematically, resilience experiments encompass various themes that social-ecological and socio-technical urban systems face. More than a third of resilience experiments intervene spatially in the built environment (see Fig. 2). Resilience experiments aim to create or revitalise public spaces and infrastructure (Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Da Nang, Panama City, Paris, Ramallah, Rotterdam, Singapore), to improve affordable housing (Cape Town, Da Nang, Durban, Melbourne, Ramallah), and enhance street accessibility (Accra, Panama City). Green and blue infrastructure involves mitigating and adapting to climate change through water sensitive urban design (Chennai, The Hague) or by creating urban green spaces. Green spaces help absorb rain during extreme weather events, store CO2, and cool down urban areas during heat waves (Addis Ababa, Amman, Can Tho, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico City, Panama City, Paris, Quito, Rotterdam, Tbilisi).

Fig. 2
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General themes of resilience experiments in Global South and North cities

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Governance emerges as a prominent theme in resilience experiments, involving improved coordination, administration training, and monitoring systems, with Global South cities emphasising these aspects more than Global North cities. In this context, cities focus strongly on climate and environmental topics, including climate change and sustainability in general (Addis Ababa, Boulder), sustainable agriculture (Can Tho), or flood risk management (Can Tho, Da Nang, Santa Fé). Climate change and risk prevention are also primary topics in capacity building (Ciudad Juarez, Da Nang, Montreal, Paris, The Hague), which is one of the themes Global North cities considerably focus on more than Global South cities.

While many resilience experiments intervene spatially in the city, the majority of these are not clearly linked to a specified scale in Global South and North cities, with a few exceptions. For instance, Panama City and Paris reference several test sites for the temporary, small-scale interventions in urban public spaces mentioned above. Concurrently, both Global South and North cities set ambitious goals to instigate change by addressing long-term stressors, such as climate change, through the majority of their experiments. Overall, the setting of resilience experiments is outlined mainly by interventions in public and green/blue infrastructure, (‘what’), is rarely delineated spatially in the city (‘where’), and focuses on long-term challenges (‘when’).

5.2 Agency in resilience experiments

The link to social justice of the setting of resilience experiments emerges in conjunction with the addressed groups and justifying narratives (the who and why). Global South cities address non-affluent and marginalised groups in 70% of their experiments, such as informal settlements, socio-economic weak neighbourhoods and pedestrians. They use especially the revitalisation or creation of public spaces to reach low-income groups. Spatial resilience experiments in Global North cities, except for affordable housing in Melbourne, are not directed towards marginalised or non-affluent groups. Nonetheless, economic experiments are linked to socio-economically weak groups in the Global North, such as the Debt Lab in The Hague mentioned above. While most governance experiments address the city administration in Global South and North cities alike, some are specifically directed towards citizens or marginalised groups: Rotterdam’s experiment entails a Governance Lab, St. Louis’ a project for better access to justice for low-income groups, and the experiments in Da Nang and Santa Fe include policy action for communities affected by flood risk.Footnote 1

Numerous resilience experiments display a narrative on social justice by recognising a social dimension as the main rationale behind the experiment (see Fig. 3). A common narrative that runs through all themes in Global South and North cities is increased social cohesion through resilience experiments. Particularly, experimental interventions for urban placemaking through public infrastructure and housing are causally linked with social cohesion. In this context, social cohesion is never defined but presented as a final goal or linear solution to social issues. In Global South cities, social cohesion is sometimes associated with stability and security, but also social connectivity. Panama City has the most comprehensive summary of what cities seem to expect from placemaking with the goal of social cohesion in one of their experiments: “It will provide a larger number of citizens from vulnerable areas with access to better services and appropriate infrastructure in order to offer inclusion, welfare and development opportunities within the city. It will enhance citizen security. It will boost connectivity among citizens and, therefore, social cohesion” (Panama City 2018, p. 103). Paris states that “a dense city where open spaces are lacking […] is a challenge for quality of life and social cohesion” (Paris 2017, p. 58). Only Lagos and Mexico City literally refer to the reduction of “social injustice” and “social inequality”, through affordable housing (Lagos 2020, p. 76) and green infrastructure (Mexico City 2016, p. 55). Although comparatively less mentioned in the non-spatial experiments of governance and capacity building, social cohesion, inclusion, stability, and security remain the main narratives in Global South and North cities.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Narratives on recognition, redistribution, and representation in resilience experiments

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In comparison to the dominant narrative of recognising social justice, the redistribution of material and immaterial goods is in general considerably lower. Material redistribution as a narrative is part of almost all resilience experiments on public as well as green/blue infrastructure in Global South and North cities. The narrative is rather implicit due to the justifying rationale to provide better access to public infrastructure for urban citizens. Where the space will be taken from and what political conflicts this might imply is not discussed. Only Addis Ababa’s placemaking experiment for public space clarifies to “repurpose vacant and underutilized places across the city and transform them into vibrant public spaces” (Addis Ababa, 2020, p. 143). The temporary, small-scale interventions mentioned above circumvent conflicts through their temporality altogether. In Global North cities, public and green infrastructure largely characterise already existing space such as public buildings and parks. While most resilience experiments avoid political conflict therefore by design, one action in Mexico City even uses the introduction and expansion of natural reservoirs as a means to delimit urban sprawl in the city’s periphery without acknowledging the inherent conflicting relationship. Although spatial interventions often target non-affluent groups in the Global South, similar attention is not given to such groups through green/blue infrastructure—neither in Global North cities.

Finally, capacity building and governance experiments allow for different interpretations of redistribution narratives. Disadvantaged groups are mentioned, but only in the context of experimental action for women (Can Tho, Ciudad Juarez), family and childhood trauma (Cape Town, Paris), and racial discrimination (Cape Town). Depending on the perspective, community capacity building can be viewed as handing down responsibilities to citizens or redistributing critical knowledge that empowers citizens. While the reading of resilience experiments in Global North and South cities depends on this view, some experiments clearly seem to fall into the first category. For example, Cape Town considers “embolded Capetonians willing and able to stand up against discrimination where it impacts themselves and others” (Cape Town 2019, p. 47) as a solution to racial discrimination without acknowledging related structural issues. In economic terms, redistribution is particularly stressed in Global North Cities, such as through a neighbourhood grant in St. Louis or the Debt Lab in The Hague (“It takes a city to solve debt”, The Hague 2019, p. 48).

In summary, Global South cities afford more agency to disadvantaged groups than Global North cities. Conversely, the majority of Global North and more than half of Global South resilience experiments acknowledge a social dimension as the main justifying narratives for experiments. Upon closer inspection, however, narratives revolve around social cohesion, connectedness, and stability, which hardly involve redistributive aspects.

5.3 Design of resilience experiments

Even though the urban society in general and marginalised groups are recognised in many resilience experiments, representation through past or future involvement is rare (see Fig. 3). In Global South cities, addressed groups are predominantly involved in resilience experiments for public infrastructure and governance. Participation is the main goal in some of the governance experiments, such as participatory neighbourhood forums in Pune or a Social Innovation Lab in Santa Fe. In the Global North, citizens are hardly involved; for example, regarding public infrastructure, only the resilience experiment on temporary, small-scale interventions in Paris includes citizen participation. In solely one resilience experiment for green infrastructure in both the Global North and South (Mexico City and Quito), the addressed, non-affluent neighbourhoods are involved.

The low representation of addressed groups in resilience experiments foreshadows a similar treatment of civil society partners in general in the envisioned implementation mode for the experiments. Civil society partners, representing organised interests, are rarely involved in implementation, as depicted in Fig. 4. In comparison to Global North cities, Global South cities show slightly higher consideration for civil society partners, as well as vertical integration, i.e. the involvement of different governance levels. Different patterns emerge regarding the remaining partner constellations. Global South cities focus more on academia and on horizontal, inter-sectoral integration, while Global North cities put more emphasis on business actors. Lastly, Global South and North cities also differ in anchoring learning mechanisms in the form of monitoring in their resilience experiments. Monitoring is part of 23% of Global North and 45% of Global South experiments. Considerations of scaling reveal the extent to which dissemination within the city constitutes an underlying goal of the approach. Intentions of scaling, also for non-spatial experiments, are outlined in less than half of resilience experiments (36.6%), more so in the Global South (40.6%) than in the Global North (32.6%).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Implementation mode of resilience experiments, including partners

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Clear differences between the Global South and North emerge in the design of resilience experiments. Global South cities place greater emphasis on inter-sectoral integration and academia regarding partnerships and cooperation for implementation, whereas Global North cities rather rely on business partners. Furthermore, Global South experiments are more inclined towards incorporating monitoring and scaling compared to those in the Global North.

6 Discussion and conclusion

Cities around the globe employ experimental interventions into the urban fabric to learn about ways how to improve resilience to the multiple crises they are currently facing. The literature on resilience and experimentation cautions, however, that with these approaches, cities may maintain the political and economic status quo and reproduce socially unjust urban realities. Although both literatures bring forward strikingly similar critiques towards resilience and urban experimentation, urban resilience experiments are rarely discussed in conjunction and are not yet studied systematically. RCN (formerly 100RC) represents one of the largest endeavours to institutionalise resilience at the city level internationally. The network emphasises a social dimension for resilience pathways and operates under a broad resilience definition that mirrors the understanding in the academic literature. In this paper, I analysed the resilience experiments in the main, strategic policy documents of 29 partaking Global South and North cities regarding social justice considerations in content and justifying narratives. As an analytical lens, I combined the urban resilience understanding of Meerow et al. (2019), which refers to social justice (whose resilience, for what, where, when, and why), with Fraser’s (2005) social justice understanding (recognition, redistribution, representation).

The findings resonate with many critics in the aforementioned literatures but also draw a more nuanced picture regarding resilience experiments. Contrary to views in the critical literature on resilience and experiments (Béné et al. 2018; Bulkeley et al. 2015; Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019; Smeds and Acuto 2018), cities overall recognise social justice issues and non-affluent groups. In particular, resilience experiments for placemaking in the built environment, which represent the largest share of experiments, are directly associated with enhancing access and well-being for urban residents in the dense city. Here, Global South experiments put emphasis on addressing disadvantaged groups. However, in the context of green and blue infrastructure experiments, which cities use to mitigate and adapt to climate change, disadvantaged groups are seldom targeted. Furthermore, cities overlook possible implications for environmental and socio-spatial justice, a trend common for urban greening (Cucca and Thaler 2023). The redistribution of space is for all spatial resilience experiments underexplored and sometimes avoided altogether through temporary interventions, concealing potential, underlying value and spatial conflicts. Therefore, as claimed in the literature (Capano and Woo 2017; Fitzgibbons and Mitchell 2019), an apolitical element emerges in the understanding of resilience experiments. This element continues in several resilience experiments for capacity building and governance across the Global South and North, which can be interpreted as handing down responsibilities to communities and marginalised groups, once more in congruence with the literature (Paschen and Beilin 2015). Nonetheless, several other capacity building and governance experiments in Global South and North cities aim to improve knowledge sharing and participation or to tackle structural inequalities. Despite some differences, such as the stronger recognition of social justice in the narratives of Global North cities and the emphasis placed on disadvantaged groups in the Global South, similar patterns emerge regarding the setting and potentially afforded agency in resilience experiments.

Different patterns materialise, however, for the procedural element in resilience experiments—the design: The Global North mainly relies on business partners for implementation, echoing critiques of a neoliberal lens and private partner-centred applications of resilience and experimentation (Bulkeley et al. 2014; Fainstein 2018). The Global South, on the other hand, relies more on horizontal, inter-sectorial integration and academia for implementation, which might decrease administrative silo-thinking and path dependency (Bulkeley et al. 2014). This result corresponds to the independent, external evaluation of the 100RC, which found that overall, cities in the network reduced administrative silos and improved coordination, also with additional stakeholders (Urban Institute 2018). In line with Chu’s finding (2016), Global South cities appear to have used RCN resources strategically to strengthen policy integration and to facilitate and legitimise experiments particularly through academic actors. However, the external evaluation found no increased levels of community involvement, as reflected in the results for actual representation in both Global South and North cities. Whereas the Global South integrates more actors in implementation, the experimental design in Global South and North cities alike does not improve multi-level governance, potentially overcoming disconnected governance structures (Chu 2016; Simon et al. 2022). Similarly, the design indicates little intention to learn from and diffuse results, in particular in the Global North. Contrary to findings of Chu (2016) as well as Krishnan et al. (2023), the Global South embeds resilience experiments stronger in a long-term logic through planned monitoring and scaling to perpetuate policies. Without this temporal embedding, it remains questionable whether, for instance, spatial resilience experiments scattered throughout the city landscape can change the status quo.

The selection of themes demonstrates that resilience experiments aim at changing the status quo and are utilised to solve long-term stressors. At the same time, they test existing forms of knowledge, as Evans (2011) and Chu (2016) have criticised. Instead of introducing new, innovative content, the majority of resilience experiments cover known topics such as green infrastructure, capacity building, and governance. The experimental approach is therefore less used for policy areas characterised by ambiguity and uncertainty, but for those lacking policy action. Based on the logic of testing for the most effective and suitable policies, experiments can fail by design and, therefore, draw on an iterative approach (Hildén et al. 2017; Huitema et al. 2018). How resilience experiments should transform policy areas with lacking policy action incrementally or disruptively without evaluation, subsequent learning and spatial or temporal scaling remains unclear. Even though narratives only partially align with a social justice understanding that comprises redistributive and representative aspects, various resilience experiments aim to advance social justice and equity. Resilience experiments failing to produce the expected results or alternative, societal benefits can be questioned for their instrumental value and lack of output legitimacy. Bulkeley (2023) has raised the question of whether experimentation is a means to an end by which traditional governance can be achieved in an ambiguous, uncertain, or entrenched policy environment, or an end in itself as a new approach to governance in the “city of permanent experimentation” (p. 12). The new policy approach deemphasises monitoring and scaling mechanisms. It appears that Global South cities align more with the former perspective, while Global North cities lean towards the latter. If this is the case, considerations of social justice should play a crucial role not only in the Global South, but also, if not more so, in the cities of the Global North, because, as Bulkeley puts it, “in the city of permanent experimentation, it matters more than ever who gets to experiment and how” (p. 12).

The results of this comparative study, deliberately including Global South cities, contribute to important insights into the novel field of urban resilience experiments and local urban action in general. They show how cities define resilience experiments in terms of setting, agency, and design. Furthermore, they reveal that social justice plays a similar role in the rationales and narratives of resilience experiments in Global South and Global North cities, apart from the design aspect. They also raise doubts regarding the instrumental value of resilience experiments, and, consequently, regarding the scope of local, urban action. The study has several limitations though. First, the study of policy documents excludes the effects of implementation, which are relevant for claims on actual output legitimacy. Nevertheless, planning documents provide important insights into the relevance of policy action, and their quality can foster effective implementation (Olazabal et al. 2019). Second, RCN has a specific resilience understanding that might have influenced resilience experiments and the consideration of social justice. Because of this, the analytical framework captures social justice in a broad way that also includes procedural and agency factors. Third, cities are selected using a stratified random strategy, varying in size and economic resources, potentially introducing bias to the results. This diverse case design aimed to explore the variations in narratives of social justice between city strategies. Finally, apart from providing first insights, a medium-sized case study lacks generalisability. Future research could address these limitations by examining different cities inside and outside the observed city network, and especially by studying implementation processes of resilience experiments on the ground.