Who Experiments in Our Cities? Pilots and Risk in the Global South

Experimental urbanism in the Global South is the habit of testing the cities of the future far from the places where they are designed: a promotional video shows glass towers rising from the sea off Lagos, clean avenues and computer-generated families, and never turns toward the other side of the fence, where a real neighbourhood floods with every high tide. Contemporary planning works increasingly through pilots, demonstration projects that trial a technology, a management model or a nature-based solution, and every pilot needs a place where failing is cheap. The South offers exactly that: inexpensive land, flexible regulation, governments hungry for investment and populations with little power of veto. The question is who designs, who funds and who carries the risk.

Robinson, Roy and Watson: the postcolonial questionnaire

Urban theory has named the pattern. Jennifer Robinson showed in Ordinary Cities (2006) that urban theory was built by studying a handful of Northern metropolises while presenting them as universal. Ananya Roy described how urban models circulate the world as ready-made recipes detached from their context. And the South African planner Vanessa Watson coined in 2014 the term African urban fantasies for the imported digital renderings of skyscraper cities projected onto real African cities. From that literature comes a simple postcolonial questionnaire: when the answers to who designs, who funds and who bears the risk point to different places, suspicion is warranted. In medicine, testing a treatment on people who never consented would be a scandal; in planning it is called a pilot and applauded at conferences.

Eko Atlantic: the climate experiment that outsources the wave

The first case is the city of towers on the sea. Off Lagos, Eko Atlantic rises on land reclaimed from the ocean behind a sea wall, marketed as a refuge against rising seas and a showcase of the African future, with design and capital largely from abroad. The available evidence shows two uncomfortable effects: protection reaches only those who can afford a home inside the perimeter, and several studies warn that the wall itself may worsen erosion along neighbouring coasts, where the people who were never consulted live. The climate experiment shields itself and outsources the wave.

India's hundred smart cities: the urbanism of speed

The second case is India's programme of one hundred smart cities, launched in 2015: sensors, apps, control centres and new towns built at speed as a national showcase. The geographer Ayona Datta, who has studied it closely, describes an urbanism of speed in which the haste of the pilot overrides the slower time of local democracy. To build some of the model cities, farmland was acquired from thousands of families with disputed compensation and no real vote on the project, and the smart citizen of the renderings rarely matches the inhabitant who already lived there. The technology is tested first; the rights are negotiated afterwards.

Próspera in Honduras and carbon offsets: experiments that demand immunity

The third and most extreme case is the experimental city with its own laws. On the Honduran island of Roatán, foreign investors promoted Próspera, a private enclave under a special legal regime with its own norms, courts and governance, whose neighbouring communities never voted on its creation. When Honduras repealed the legal framework in 2022, the promoters claimed compensation of nearly eleven billion dollars from the state before international arbitration. Here the laboratory shows its purest trait: the experiment demands immunity from the territory that hosts it. Some carbon offset projects behave similarly, managing forests and mangroves to absorb other people's emissions while restricting the uses of the communities that lived from them.

The counterargument deserves fairness. These projects bring investment, jobs and infrastructure to places that need them, many Southern governments pursue them actively, and experimentation is not bad in itself: mobile money born in Kenya and bus rapid transit invented in Curitiba travelled from South to North and were copied worldwide. The problem is not that experiments exist or where the idea comes from, but how consent, benefit and risk are distributed. That distinction separates cooperation from trials run on third parties, and it gives planners a test to apply to every showcase city: whether the people on the other side of the fence chose it, gain from it and could say no.