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Sandbox to System: How Urban Experiments Scale and Endure
Wednesday September 23, 2026 4:15pm - 5:30pm CEST
Time Room - Czasoprzestrzeń / SpaceTime
Sandbox to System: How Urban Experiments Scale and Endure
Urban experiments are easy to start. Making them last or scale is another matter entirely.
This session brings together three organisations from Helsinki, Bucharest, and Berlin who have each spent years running civic and placemaking experiments in radically different contexts. Together they cover the full arc: how to design experiments that work, how to learn across many at once, and how to turn a successful temporary project into lasting urban infrastructure.
But this is also a peer-learning session. Participants bring their own experiments, projects that worked but haven't yet found a permanent home. Working across at least three tables, and drawing on concrete cases from each city, we map together what it takes to move from a one-off initiative to embedded urban practice: the organisational conditions, the right partners, the funding logic, and the cultural shift needed inside city administrations.
The shared question running through all three tables: what makes urban experiments successful, transferable, and repeatable? And what does it actually take to stop calling something a pilot?


Speakers
avatar for Timo Hämäläinen

Timo Hämäläinen

Senior Advisor, City of Helsinki
avatar for Sabina Mihailescu

Sabina Mihailescu

Co-Founder & General Manager, DearNeighbour
Sabina Mihailescu is the founder of Placemaking CEE and co-founder and General Manager of DearNeighbour, Romania's largest neighborhood community-building organization, active across 100+ communities in 32 cities with 15,000+ engaged neighbors. Her work starts from the courtyard... Read More →
avatar for Henriette Närger

Henriette Närger

Project Manager Kiezlabor, CityLAB / Technologie Stiftung Berlin
Henriette Närger is project manager of the Kiezlabor at CityLAB Berlin, Berlin's public innovation lab at the intersection of public administration, academia, and civil society. She works on connecting participatory design, urban development, and technology. Her background is in... Read More →
avatar for Katja Hermes

Katja Hermes

Strategic Operations, CityLAB / Technologiestiftung Berlin
Katja Hermes works at CityLAB Berlin, a civic innovation lab where she initiated and developed the Kiezlabor, Berlin's mobile urban lab. Since 2023, the Kiezlabor has toured more than 20 neighbourhoods, creating spaces where citizens and public administration develop ideas together... Read More →
avatar for Hannah Mühlbach

Hannah Mühlbach

working student, CityLAB / Technologiestiftung
Hannah Mühlbach is a designer and she works in the field of urban development and community participation. She is currently studying for a Master’s degree in Urban Design and works at the Kiezlabor at CityLAB Berlin.
Wednesday September 23, 2026 4:15pm - 5:30pm CEST
Time Room - Czasoprzestrzeń / SpaceTime Tramwajowa 1-3, 51-621 Wrocław, Poland
  Sandbox City: the Courage to Experiment, panel discussion
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Attendees (9)


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