Today, cities all over the world are engaged in sustainability transitions (McCormick et al. 2013). They develop urban initiatives in view of a fundamental transformation of socio-technical systems such as the mobility system, housing system, food system, etc. Sustainability transitions are often framed as a matter of ‘learning by doing’ and ‘doing by learning’ (Loorbach 2007), emerging in what Hajer calls an institutional void: a situation in which there are no generally accepted rules and norms regarding how to act. Since there are no obvious and uncontested solutions and strategies for decision-making, it is argued, we have to ‘learn our way out’ of unsustainability (Finger and Asun 2001). Yet, as Dewey (1938/2015) argues, experiential learning is not a self-explanatory idea. The educative value of urban sustainability transition initiatives should be explored theoretically as well as empirically. The latter is the aim of the case study presented in this paper. We analyse and discuss the learning and meaning-making taking place in an urban sustainability transition initiative: A project that gathers a variety of actors in view of upscaling short food supply chains in Ghent (Belgium) which fit in a broader sustainable food strategy of the city council. Farmers, retailers, policymakers, researchers, representatives of large organisations such as schools, hospitals, big companies, etc. come together in parallel as well as mixed workshops in order to create and discuss different alternative scenarios for realising this ambition. Using practical epistemology analysis (PEA) and dramaturgical analysis, we investigate how this initiative creates a space for experiential learning. PEA is an analytical method created by Wickman and Östman (2002) that views meaning making (learning) as a matter of bridging gaps by constituting relations between the new and unknown and what is already known. It is thus a well-suited framework to empirically examine learning in the context of institutional voids. Dramaturgical analytical frameworks (Hajer 2005) are developed for the analysis of how the design of a participatory setting affects 'what is said, what can be said and what can be said with influence’. Combining PEA and dramaturgical analysis we will examine how the ‘scripting’ (characters in the play, cues for appropriate behaviour, access conditions), ‘staging’ (tools, methodologies, activities, artefacts, formal and informal rules of the game, etc.) and ‘performance’ (the contextualised interaction) of the workshops affect whether and how learning-gaps are noticed and handled and how participants fill these gaps.

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