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Transforming the relational dynamics of urban governance: How social innovation research can create a trajectory for learning and change
Abstract
This article examines how social innovation (SI) research can co-produce transformative change in cities. A key challenge is to diffuse and sustain SIs in ways that transform the relational webs that constitute local spaces and their governance. The relational approach to SI is conceptually promising in this respect, but its foundations and practices need to be further developed. Therefore, I develop a relational ‘theory–methods package’ of practice theory and action research. By co-producing immediately usable insights, experiences and artefacts in the daily practice of SI, this approach enables researchers to gradually create conditions for a transformative trajectory of learning and change in urban governance. I critically appraise four research practices in the context of SI in Dutch urban governance and reflect on the transformative potential of this relational theory–methods package.
... The relational turn in the SI literature has increased understanding of how relational dynamics of resistance and change at the interface of SIs and their institutional environment influence the spread and institutionalization of alternative ideas and practices (Bartels, 2017(Bartels, , 2020Haxeltine et al. 2017;MacCallum 2009;Pel et al. 2020). It offers a robust, albeit developing approach for advancing multi-faceted understanding of innovation that is not confined … to analysing the intentional actions and practices of social players based on pre-defined social objectives … [but] incorporates the socio-political and economic contexts wherein said actions are carried out … , along with the social systems that are conditioning them (Gurrutxaga Abad and Galarraga Ezponda 2022, 12). ...
... This article is based on action research conducted between February 2016 and August 2017 with Blossom Liverpool. Action research is a popular approach to enabling SI researchers and stakeholders to co-produce knowledge and action that addresses urgent problems, builds capacities and resources for learning and change, and promotes sustainability transitions Wittmayer et al. 2017;Bartels, 2020). Like experiential learning, action research is grounded in classical pragmatism and revolves around a cycle of collaboratively identifying a problematic situation, reflecting on shared experiences and knowledge, and planning, carrying out and evaluating interventions (Greenwood and Levin 2007). ...
... Experiential learning addresses the need for research, policy and practice that embed learning into urban governance (Seyfang and Smith 2007;Beukers and Bertolini 2021). My approach to co-producing experiential learning contributes to growing understanding of how action research can support SI (Bartels, 2020). Future studies should ideally work in research teams to deal more reflexively with the inevitable influence of action researchers' positionality. ...
Community-led social innovations have great potential to drive sustainable change but often struggle to sustain themselves in urban governance systems. Social learning is a prevalent strategy for sustaining social innovation, but limits understanding of, and abilities for transforming its relational dynamics. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I explain how experiential learning offers a relational framework for facilitating an interactive, holistic and embodied process of learning to transform engrained relational patterns and hegemonic forces that constrain personal and social potentialities. Based on action research conducted with an impactful community-led social innovation struggling to sustain itself, I conceptualize experiential learning as learning-in-relation-to-others-and-the-world: cultivating capacities and resources for growing individually and together in relation to hegemonic forces. I conclude that learning should not be treated as an internal responsibility of social innovations but as a key condition for ecosystems that sustain social innovation and transform urban governance.
... This replication-driven policy design took for granted the assumption that the three lighthouse cities could be the only ones spelling out urban solutions, without considering whether, first, the urban implementations in the lighthouse cities were appropriate for the fellow cities, and, second, the fellow cities already had ongoing replicable models worth considering. Instead, this article offers an experimental alternative from the social innovation perspective [22,[41][42][43][44] by offering an enhanced policy approach. That is, interaction and learning among cities and their related stakeholders would be multidirectional, radial, dynamic, iterative, and democratic. ...
... This group must also engage in joint and continuous conversations with diverse and numerous groups of city-regional stakeholders, as well as consider a generation of smart technologies (including the increasingly autonomous machine intelligence that can gather and analyse granular and real-time "big data") if it is to effectively tackle the most pressing economic, technologic, ethical, and social issues that face European cities [15,[19][20][21]. The smart cities that prosper in the future will likely be those that are best equipped at learning from other cities and high-tech conurbations-and directly from their stakeholders-for replicating, experimenting, adapting, and scaling up initiatives by adopting a complex and socially innovative constellation of post-GDPR smart technologies predicated upon Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reflexive autonomous Machine Learning, digital innovation and the Internet of Things (enhanced by 5G and new sensor technologies), and quantum leaps in data infrastructure and capacities [22][23][24]. Additionally, city representatives should be equally prepared to identify the risks and vulnerabilities associated with the techno-politics of data and the democratic misalignment that the gig economy generates through disruptions and power imbalances among stakeholders [12,[25][26][27][28][29][30], particularly relevant from the GDPR perspective to protect workers and citizens from the negative side-effects of the COVID-19 aftermath in European cities. ...
... The replication function actually has proven the requirement to be connected with local contextual ecosystems of stakeholders to better adopt the suggested and agreed upon urban interventions [41]. In line with the DNA of the resulting City-to-City Learning Programme in the Replicate EC-H2020-SCC lighthouse project, Bartels [22] argues that social innovation now can play an active role in bolstering transformative change and create a trajectory for learning for smart cities and their urban governance [79]. This article offers an operational alternative through a conceptual evolution of the understanding and implementation of replication in the given institutional corpus of EC-H2020-SCC in the specific Replicate project through five transitions stemming from a multiple stakeholder-driven, socially innovative perspective. ...
... This replication-driven policy design took for granted the assumption that the three lighthouse cities could be the only ones spelling out urban solutions, without considering whether, first, the urban implementations in the lighthouse cities were appropriate for the fellow cities, and, second, the fellow cities already had ongoing replicable models worth considering. Instead, this article offers an experimental alternative from the social innovation perspective [22,[41][42][43][44] by offering an enhanced policy approach. That is, interaction and learning among cities and their related stakeholders would be multidirectional, radial, dynamic, iterative, and democratic. ...
... This group must also engage in joint and continuous conversations with diverse and numerous groups of city-regional stakeholders, as well as consider a generation of smart technologies (including the increasingly autonomous machine intelligence that can gather and analyse granular and real-time "big data") if it is to effectively tackle the most pressing economic, technologic, ethical, and social issues that face European cities [15,[19][20][21]. The smart cities that prosper in the future will likely be those that are best equipped at learning from other cities and high-tech conurbations-and directly from their stakeholders-for replicating, experimenting, adapting, and scaling up initiatives by adopting a complex and socially innovative constellation of post-GDPR smart technologies predicated upon Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reflexive autonomous Machine Learning, digital innovation and the Internet of Things (enhanced by 5G and new sensor technologies), and quantum leaps in data infrastructure and capacities [22][23][24]. Additionally, city representatives should be equally prepared to identify the risks and vulnerabilities associated with the techno-politics of data and the democratic misalignment that the gig economy generates through disruptions and power imbalances among stakeholders [12,[25][26][27][28][29][30], particularly relevant from the GDPR perspective to protect workers and citizens from the negative side-effects of the COVID-19 aftermath in European cities. ...
... The replication function actually has proven the requirement to be connected with local contextual ecosystems of stakeholders to better adopt the suggested and agreed upon urban interventions [41]. In line with the DNA of the resulting City-to-City Learning Programme in the Replicate EC-H2020-SCC lighthouse project, Bartels [22] argues that social innovation now can play an active role in bolstering transformative change and create a trajectory for learning for smart cities and their urban governance [79]. This article offers an operational alternative through a conceptual evolution of the understanding and implementation of replication in the given institutional corpus of EC-H2020-SCC in the specific Replicate project through five transitions stemming from a multiple stakeholder-driven, socially innovative perspective. ...
This article addresses the problem of replication among smart cities in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020: Smart Cities and Communities (EC-H2020-SCC) framework programme. This article initially sets the general policy context by conducting a benchmarking about the explicit replication strategies followed by each of the 17 ongoing EC-H2020-SCC lighthouse projects. This article aims to shed light on the following research question: Why might replication not be happening among smart cities as a unidirectional, hierarchical, mechanistic, solutionist, and technocratic process? Particularly, in asking so, it focuses on the EC-H2020-SCC Replicate project by examining in depth the fieldwork action research process implemented during 2019 through a knowledge exchange webinar series with participant stakeholders from six European cities—three lighthouse cities (St. Sebastian, Florence, and Bristol) and three follower-fellow cities (Essen, Lausanne, and Nilüfer). This process resulted in a City-to-City Learning Programme that reformulated the issue of replication by experimenting an alternative and an enhanced policy approach. Thus, stemming from the evidence-based policy outcomes of the City-to-City Learning Programme, this article reveals that a replication policy approach from the social innovation lenses might be enabled as a multidirectional, radial, dynamic, iterative, and democratic learning process, overcoming the given unidirectional, hierarchical, mechanistic, solutionist, and technocratic approach.
... Considering the above, Calzada [16] suggests a City-to-City Learning Program, which follows a social innovation perspective that considers the multiple stakeholders in a city (regardless of the city being a Lighthouse or a Smart Cities 2023, 6 3 Fellow City), and also emphasizes how replication could be effectively facilitated through the city network's multidirectional, radial, dynamic, iterative, and democratic learning process [30][31][32]. This idea is also supported by Bartels [33] and Calzada and Cobo [34], who claim that social innovation can play an active role in strengthening transformative change and support the learning trajectory for smart cities and their urban governance. ...
... The five cities had continuous help and support from within the consortium as is necessary for any replication activity, such as being involved in the project since the start [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] or participating in regular interaction activities to make sure no city is left on their own [24][25][26][27]. As the project focus was more towards energy and mobility, other aspects such as social innovation [33] were not included as a possible idea for the future. ...
Cities have an undoubted significant role in climate change mitigation. Several cities across the globe have made commitments to sustainability transitions through green strategies. In the recent past, Europe has witnessed a surge in the development of smart cities and advancement towards creating more sustainable cities. At the moment, the concept of Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) further encourages districts and cities to change their business-as-usual ways to be more carbon neutral. This paper looks at the five cities of Maia, Reykjavik, Kifissia, Kladno, and Lviv that are a part of an ongoing Horizon 2020 project. The purpose of the paper was to understand the steps the cities have taken to select the 10 solutions for replication. The information was collected through discussions, interviews and implementation plans developed by each city. It must be highlighted that each city’s circumstances differ in terms of political support, finances, technical expertise, and stakeholders’ interest, and this applies to all world cities when discussing the implementation of new efficient solutions. Cities across Europe and beyond may find themselves in a similar situation, and therefore, this paper also provides a story of the five Fellow Cities as they transition towards PEDs.
... We borrow our understanding of participatory action research from Koen Bartels, who has explored how participatory action research can co-produce transformative change in urban contexts. As Bartels (2020Bartels ( : 2873 writes, action research aims at 'transforming relational dynamics by coproducing immediately usable insights, experiences and artefacts . By addressing immediate emergent needs . ...
... Whilst some learning on this may be drawn from other experiments in economic democracy (most obviously, but certainly not limited to, community land trusts), empirical research is largely premised on the establishment of functioning PCPs. Committed forms of research militancy, scholar activism and participatory action research are thus less a choice but rather a precondition of creating new knowledge in this field (Bartels, 2020). Nonetheless, we hypothesise three different modes through which PCPs have the potential to be generative of a wider politics of the common: immediate, directional and solidaristic. ...
This article considers the potential of Public-Common Partnerships (PCPs) to act as a new muni-cipalist intervention against the privatisation and financialisation of land in the UK. In previous publications, we have presented PCPs in abstract terms as a municipalist organisational form that could help communities eschew the disciplinary effects of finance capital to pursue alternative democratic forms of urban development. Here, we start to examine what this process looks like in practice. The article draws from ongoing participatory action research in two contrasting case studies, Wards Corner in Haringey and Union Street in Plymouth. We find that by establishing enduring organisational structures where collective decisions can be made about who owns and manages land and assets, PCPs could bolster already existing efforts to democratise urban development in both cities. As an organisational form, PCPs reframe the 'local' as a politics of proximity , decentre and reimagine the role of municipal institutions and foreground a politics of the common. This makes them an archetypal new municipalist strategy, well-suited to contesting the enclosure of urban landscapes. The article concludes by considering the development of PCPs within the broader new municipalist tendency.
... For this reason, social innovation in cities should always take a multitude of different urban stakeholders into account (Nicholls and Murdock 2012). Building on relational thinking in urban studies, Bartels (2020) developed the relational approach to social innovation to enhance capacities for transforming these relational dynamics by co-producing actionable knowledge with local actors. However, he admits that the relational approach to social innovation is conceptually promising in this respect, but its foundations and practices need to be further developed. ...
... Many authors agree that social innovation have a transformative power in urban development processes (Moulaert et al. 2005;d'Ovidio and Pradel 2013;Blanco and León 2017;Bartels 2020). We can understand them as a way to fight social exclusion providing resources and empowerment to communities and promoting new ways of participation (Pradel-Miquel 2017; Poljak Istenič 2019) such as social entrepreneurship (Van Dyck 2012), crowdfunding (Langley et al. 2020) that can represent the needed nexus between social finance and social innovation (Moore, Westley, and Nicholls 2012), urban agriculture (Pickard 2018), and so on. ...
Industrial towns are often framed as marginalized and less innovative compared with service-oriented urban agglomerations. Their specific trajectories create both opportunities and constraints for new concepts, such as social innovation. However, little is known about their innovative capacity in relation to societal and cultural norms and social capital. The objective of this article is therefore to analyse the capacity of an industrial town to generate social innovation on the case study of Velenje, Slovenia. By employing a concept of industrial culture and an interactive process of research and action with the local community, we try to link territorially embedded norms, values and social capital to producing past, present-day and possible future social innovations. Velenje can be described as ‘innovative milieu’ since many social innovations, strongly territorially and historically embedded, were developed in the town. The main drivers of these innovations seem to be socialist and industrial values, which largely persist in the modern era, also due to very engaged youth. The town‘s capacity to produce social innovation is further enhanced by a culture of collaboration. The article challenges contemporary notions of non-innovative (post-socialist) industrial towns and highlights the capability of industrial culture to unlock the local innovation potential.
... Our second contribution is the application and further development of the concept of assemblage for critical and practicetheoretical urban theory (e.g. Bartels, 2020;Beveridge and Koch, 2017;Blanco et al., 2014;Brenner and Schmid, 2015;Verloo, 2018). Practice theories help to see how human activities are needed for the urban to be (re)produced and transformed. ...
... As Brenner and Schmid observe, urban space is defined by the people who use, appropriate and transform it through their daily routines and practices, which frequently involve struggles regarding the very form and content of the urban itself, at once as a site and stake of social experience. (2015: 171) In contrast to the approach of many practice theorists (Bartels, 2020;Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009), however, we do not start from the stable daily routines of formal organisations or in the unintended transformations that the practices of ordinary citizens amount to. Our starting point is the assembling we observed in the heart of evertransforming urban contexts. ...
This article places those working for change in urban neighbourhoods at the centre of debates on urban transformation, directing attention to the importance of human agency in the work of assembling urban transformation. Drawing on cross-national qualitative fieldwork undertaken over 30 months shadowing 40 urban practitioners in neighbourhoods across four European cities – Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow – our research revealed the catalytic, embodied roles of situated agents in this assembling. Through exemplar vignettes, we present practices in a diverse range of socio-material assemblages aimed to address complex problems and unmet needs in the urban environment. The practices we studied were not those of daily routines, but were instead a purposeful assembling that included nurturing and developing of heterogeneous resources such as relationships, knowledges and materials, framed through an emerging vision to inform, mobilise and channel action. This article brings together assemblage-theoretical and practice-theoretical ideas, with rich empirical insight to advance our understanding of how the city may be re-made.
... Relational action research, much of which comes out of the Social Innovation literature, is one of those ontological contributions (see Bartels 2020, Greenwood & Levin 2007and Frantzeskaki & Rok 2018. The 'radical interdependence' work of Arturo Escobar (2017) on transition design, particularly noteworthy for its ontological roots in the ground-breaking insights of Maturana and Varela, is another. ...
... Action research is "co-generative learning" with "ongoing and purposive redesign" (Greenwood and Levin, 2007, p. 133-4). It is a "deliberate yet emergent strategy for developing joint readings of unfolding events and crystalizing where to intervene and how to give shape to change" (Bartels, 2020(Bartels, , p. 2876. The gateway to transformational action research is co-sensing the social field through "total immersion in the particulars of the field-in the living presence of the phenomenon,…becoming one with the phenomenon you study" (Scharmer 2007, p. 147). ...
... Another key implication of this study for urban policy and practice is that, since urban challenges are constantly changing in response to emergent needs and priorities, adaptive and transformative planning and governance systems should be prioritized (Bartels, 2020;Birkmann et al., 2010). This is essential as climate change,ever-increasing technological transformations, and demographic changes are likely to increase uncertainties and constantly change urban dynamics (Rauws, 2017). ...
The global population has rapidly urbanized over the past century, and the urbanization rate is projected to reach about 70% by 2050. In line with these trends and the increasing recognition of the significance of cities in addressing local and global challenges, a lot of research has been published on urban studies and planning since the middle of the twentieth century. While the number of publications has been rapidly increasing over the past decades, there is still a lack of studies analyzing the field's knowledge structure and its evolution. To fill this gap, this study analyzes data related to more than 100,000 articles indexed under the “Urban Studies” and “Regional & Urban Planning” subject categories of the Web of Science. We conduct various analyses such as term co-occurrence, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and citation analysis to identify the key defining thematic areas of the field and examine how they have evolved. We also identify key authors, journals, references, and organizations that have contributed more to the field's development. The analysis is conducted over five periods: 1956–1975 (the genesis period), 1976–1995 (economic growth and environmentalism), 1996–2015 (sustainable development and technological innovation), 2016–2019 (climate change and SDGs), and 2020 onwards (post-COVID urbanism). Four major thematic areas are identified: 1) socio-economic issues and inequalities, 2) economic growth and innovation, 3) urban ecology and land use planning, and 4) urban policy and governance and sustainability. The first two are recurring themes over different periods, while the latter two have gained currency over the past 2–3 decades following global events and policy frameworks related to global challenges like sustainability and climate change. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, issues related to smart cities, big data analytics, urban resilience, and governance have received particular attention. We found disproportionate contributions to the field from the Global North. Some countries from the Global South with rapid urbanization rates are underrepresented, which may have implications for the future of urbanization. We conclude the study by highlighting thematic gaps and other critical issues that need to be addressed by urban scholars to accelerate the transition toward sustainable and resilient cities.
... Social innovation can be a complex process, often involving several actors and cooperative relationships, and it is context-specific: particular solutions work well in particular contexts Towards brighter futures for European small and medium-sized towns 195 and can therefore not always be scaled up or transferred (Bartels 2020;Reynolds et al. 2017;Van Dyck and Van den Broeck 2013). Moulaert and MacCallum (2019) stress the territoriality of social innovations: 'Socially innovative actions do not simply happen within places; they happen in response to place-specific issues and through the mobilisation of place-specific resources' (Moulaert and MacCallum 2019, p. 80). ...
This chapter will first introduce the concepts of social sustainability and social innovation
and discuss its potentials and limitations when it is applied in urban and regional development. This is followed by a review of development challenges and future perspectives of small and medium-sized towns in general, and small and medium-sized industrial towns in particular. The two topics came together in the recently completed Bright Future for Black Towns project, in which the authors of this chapter were involved. In this project, the development paths and narratives, current strengths and weaknesses, and future perspectives of small and medium-sized (post-)industrial towns in Europe were analysed. After briefly introducing the project and its case study towns, the main focus of this chapter is on one of the project’s most important elements: a comparative analysis of social sustainability and social innovation.
... Many authors agree that social innovations have an impact on the activation of seniors, thereby enhancing their self-confidence (Bartels, 2020;Blanco and León, 2017). We can see them as a way of combating social exclusion that provides resources, empowers communities, and promotes new ways of participation. ...
Background: The aging of the population is currently an increasingly discussed phenomenon. In this situation, it is worth paying attention to new trends and forms of providing innovative methods and techniques that would enable the activation of seniors. The aim of the presented text is to reflect on the empowering functions of participatory reminiscence techniques and the creation of future scenarios in the context of social work.
Methods: The aim of the research into a group of 3 senior women is to interpret the narrations of communication partners in relation to capturing memories, experiencing the present and the vision of the future in a particular place with innovative implementation of two participatory techniques - reminiscence and creating future scenarios.
Results: The results indicate a need for social workers to achieve greater involvement of seniors at two levels: (1) at the level of individual work with clients (seniors in this case), where the results point to the need to emphasize the creation of opportunities for engagement of (not only) seniors in participatory activities, and (2) at the macro level of work, where there is a clear demand for a change in society, leading to an increase in the degree of social cohesion.
Conclusions: The research showed that reminiscence and the creation of future scenarios of senior women manifested themselves in a wide range of empowering functions conceived as purpose/goal, result, functioning, and functionality.
... To sum up, this article has paid particular attention to the way digital rights discourse has been already embedded in the institutional digital strategies of 13 CCDR cities. The author hopes that this exploratory action research will invite additional research on social, institutional, and technological innovation studies and spark a debate about the need to include digital rights in the strategic and operational sustainable formulations of smart cities worldwide [132][133][134][135]. Informed Consent Statement: The 13 CCDR city representatives/strategies were asked for an informed consent when sending the questionnaire. ...
New data-driven technologies in global cities have yielded potential but also have intensified techno-political concerns. Consequently, in recent years, several declarations/manifestos have emerged across the world claiming to protect citizens' digital rights. In 2018, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and NYC city councils formed the Cities' Coalition for Digital Rights (CCDR), an international alliance of global People-Centered Smart Cities-currently encompassing 49 cities worldwide-to promote citizens' digital rights on a global scale. People-centered smart cities programme is the strategic flagship programme by UN-Habitat that explicitly advocates the CCDR as an institutionally innovative and strategic city-network to attain policy experimentation and sustainable urban development. Against this backdrop and being inspired by the popular quote by Hannah Arendt on "the right to have rights", this article aims to explore what "digital rights" may currently mean within a sample consisting of 13 CCDR global people-centered smart cities: Barcelona,-gow. Particularly, this article examines the (i) understanding and the (ii) prioritisation of digital rights in 13 cities through a semi-structured questionnaire by gathering 13 CCDR city representa-tives/strategists' responses. These preliminary findings reveal not only distinct strategies but also common policy patterns.
To cite this journal article:
Calzada, I. (2021), The Right to Have Digital Rights in Smart Cities. Sustainability 13(20), 11438. DOI:10.3390/su132011438. Special Issue “Social Innovation in Sustainable Urban Development”.
... In this work, a territorial policy case study entitled "Accelerator for the local economy", delivered by the Municipality of Milan, will be presented with the aim of conceptualising a policy cycle capable of incorporating lessons from interdisciplinary literature on social innovation in all its phases. The starting assumption of this contribution is that social innovation may represent not only the content but also the methodology to design new territorial policies (Bartels, 2020;Moulaert et al., 2007;Nussbaumer, 2005, Tricarico andVenturi, 2020). The issue of social innovation has so far been less investigated by labour economists and macroeconomists, who usually focus on the technological dimension of innovation. ...
The article aims to conceptualise an urban policy cycle that incorporates the social and territorial innovation approach in all its phases. This conceptualisation will be supported by a case study analysis, the “Accelerator for the local economy”, an urban policy promoted by the Municipality of Milan in cooperation with a group of local partners, and included in the governmental framework of the Fondo per l’innovazione sociale (Social Innovation Fund). The project under consideration has been designed to support an “acceleration programme for local businesses”, implemented with a view to improving entrepreneurship, skills, and the creation of job opportunities in peripheral areas – a response from the Milan municipal administration to tackle urban marginality issues and the ongoing economic crisis resulting from the harmful effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The hypothesis to be tested is whether social and territorial innovation can be not only the content, but also the method for creating a territorial development policy, by acquiring the dispersed knowledge of actors and targets, by triggering collective intelligence processes in the redefinition of social needs, and by tabling shared solutions among stakeholders.
... Empirically, we reveal how the fragmented governance architecture of Amsterdam goes hand in hand with residential property production as an entrepreneurial political project. Existing studies on Amsterdam's governance transformation are limited to sectoral analyses of regulation, market, or policy dynamics (Bartels, 2020;Hochstenbach and Ronald, 2020;Savini et al., 2016). In contrast, we operationalise our more comprehensive approach by analysing i) the way property industry activity is regulated by the public sector; ii) the way public administrative structures relate to property market activity; and iii) the way policy interventions and tools are narrated in regulations affecting residential property production. ...
While the entrepreneurialisation of local administrations is widely acknowledged, the extent and format of institutional and organisational structures that accompany market-oriented ideological shifts and transitions in urban governance often remain unnoticed. This article provides an original theoretical argument and frame of analysis to forensically study the underlying infrastructures of entrepreneurial governance systems. We argue that complex institutional and organisational arrangements in market-oriented urban development can be comprehended through fragmented governance architectures, a conceptual perspective that we borrowed from governance studies and operationalised in relation to property development. We illustrate the application of the framework by examining entrepreneurial transformations in Amsterdam’s residential property production. Based on rich empirical evidence, including discourse analysis, policy analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy and property industry actors, we illuminate divergent public-sector regulation of market activities, intra-organisational discrepancies, and fuzzy narratives in policy interventions which are tied to specific spatial interventions mushrooming in the city. Uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory institutional ties link public and private actors in these property production processes, forming a complex and chaotic landscape of regulations, actors, and relations. This fragmentation, we posit, warrants recognition as it lies at the heart of scattered investments in the urban built environment.
... Despite the abundant literature about SI, the notion may be blurred too much in the current policy debate [56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73]. As Mihci [74] (p. ...
The smart cities policy approach has been intensively implemented in European cities under the Horizon 2020 programme. However, these implementations not only reduce the interdependencies among stakeholders to technocratic Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) models, but also fail to question the identities of strategic stakeholders and how they prioritise their business/social models. These aspects are putting democracy at stake in smart cities. Therefore, this article aims to unfold and operationalise multistakeholders’ policy frameworks from the social innovation perspective by suggesting the ex-novo penta-helix framework—including public, private, academia, civic society, and social entrepreneurs/activists—to extend the triple and quadruple-helix frameworks. Based on fieldwork action research conducted from February 2017 to December 2018—triangulating desk research, 75 interviews, and three validation workshops—this article applies the penta-helix framework to map out five strategic dimensions related to (i) multistakeholder helix framework and (ii) the resulting business/social models comparatively in three follower cities of the H2020-Replicate project: Essen (Germany), Lausanne (Switzerland), and Nilüfer (Turkey). For each case study, the findings reveal: (i) a unique multistakeholder composition, (ii) diverse preferences on business/social models, (iii) a regular presence of the fifth helix as intermediaries, and (iv) the willingness to experiment with democratic arrangements beyond the hegemonic PPP.
... historian zehar, GBk definizio eta moldaera asko izan ditu. Artikulu honetan, autore anitzen ekarpen eguneratuak bilduta (Angelidou;Psaltoglou 2017;Bartels 2020;Bund et al. 2015;Engelbrecht 2018;European Commission 2010;Mihci 2019;Moulaert et al. 2007;Pel et al. 2019;Poppen;decker 2018;Preskill;Beer 2012;Sabato et al. 2017;Schubert 2018;Terstriep et al. 2020) bi zati osagarrik definituko dute GB: (2017). Autore asko izan dira berau perspektiba ezberdinetatik jorratu dutenak (Grimm et al. 2013;MacCallum 2019;Moulaert et al. 2017;Mulgan 2006;Nicholls et al. 2015;Van de Broeck et al. 2019) eta baita ere Euskal herriko testuinguru konkretuari aplikatutako analisi makro, meso, eta mikroak (Calzada 2011;2016a;Casado da Rocha;Calzada 2015;Echevarría 2008;heales et al. 2017;Martínez Moreno 2018;unceta et al. 2016). ...
ABSTRACT: This article draws on the thorny topic of the Social Innovation (SI). Particularly, it revolves around the role of those social movements promoting the Basque language not only in relation to their organisational models but also to their holistic strategy to tackle inevitably digital, urban, and political challenges surfaced by the disruptions stemming from the post-COVID society. Beyond the prescriptive, normative, or dogmatic standpoints, by contrast, this article actually aims to reflect upon and spark a fruitful debate on the current momentum by applying an amalgamation of SI concepts to the reality of the Basque Country. It employs ‘Action Research’ methodology to gather information and carry out fieldwork research as follows: (i) The invitation made by Euskaltzaleen Topagunea (as the main body for coordinating civic groups) to deliver a conference in the Symposium called Topaldia 2020 was the point of departure of this article. (ii) Consequently, Soziolinguistikako Klusterra (as the main body of research for the Basque language social development) through its scientific journal Bat, disseminates within this article the main findings of this ‘Action Research’ process. Thus, the article is structured in five sections: (i) first, it develops the SI concept and applies through its lenses a re-interpretation of the current momentum for the Basque language in the techno-political parameters (social entrepreneurship, activism, and co-operativism); (ii) second, in the backdrop of the post-COVID society, this article argues that, more than ever before, ‘liquid’ social movements are required to lead niche experiments; (iii) third, as a result of the digital, urban, and political transformations, the basque language, euskara, should be articulated as a ‘commons’, beyond the binary terms of the public and private; (iv) fourth, this article adopts as a case study the social experimentation project entitled ‘Euskaraldia’ taking place once every two years, in which people related to the Basque language, Euskara—though the profiling of two interdependent roles, active speakers as ‘ahobizi’, and early-adopters, practitioners, and listeners as ‘belarriprest’—in all seven provicinces and the Diaspore of the Basque Country, are encouraged to speak more intensively Euskara over an 11-day period (www.euskaraldia.eus) by overcoming motivational, contextual, and psycho-sociological boundaries and threats imposed by the diglosic lock-in effect. This section, therefore, slightly outline a prototype from the Digital SI perspective called ‘Euskaraldia, as a Digital Panopticon’; ultimately (v), this article concludes with a decalogue and five questions by further encouraging active reflection and social experimentation among stakeholders.
Keywords: Social Innovation; Liquid Social Movements; Commons; Euskaraldia; Digital Panopticon; Technopolitics; Data; Urban Transformations; Digital Transformations; Political Transformations; Post-COVID Society; Social Entrepreneurship; Activism; Co-operativism
To cite this article/Artikulua erreferentziatzeko erabili honako zita:
Calzada, I. (2020), Gizarte Mugimenduen Rola Gizarte Berrikuntzan (GB): Euskaraldia, Panoptiko Digital Gisa // The Role of Social Movements in the Social Innovation (SI): Euskaraldia as a Digital Panopticon. BAT Aldizkaria 115(2): 85-114.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35980.05763/5. CC BY-NC 4.0
L’innovation sociale suscite un intérêt grandissant de la part des administrations municipales. Or, l’adoption de processus d’innovation sociale par une organisation municipale comporte son lot d’ajustements auxarrangements institutionnels. Cet article s’intéresse au développement et à la promotion de processus d’innovation sociale par des acteurs non gouvernementaux à l’échelle municipale. L’objectif est d’identifier les barrières institutionnelles et bureaucratiques à l’innovation sociale, et d’offrir un cadre conceptuel aux praticiens faisant face à cet enjeu afin de favoriser le franchissement de ces barrières. Social innovation is attracting growing interest from municipal governments. However, the adoption of social innovation processes by a municipal organization involves adjustments to the institutional arrangements. This article focuses on the development and promotion of social innovation processes by municipal non-governmental actors. The objective is to identify the institutional and bureaucratic barriers to social innovation, and to offer a conceptual framework to practitioners facing this problem to help overcome these barriers.
In this chapter, we investigate how the ideas of the social and solidarity economy (SSE) can strengthen the social and cultural aspects of the circular economy (CE) in an urban context. Cities are essential to the CE transition as over 50% of the world population lives in urban areas, and 60-80% of natural resources are consumed in cities. We analyze the various notions of SSE and their potential links with CE via a theoretical literature review and conduct a comparative case analysis focused on CE-and SSE-driven urban development projects in Finland, Uruguay, and Spain. As a provisional result, we specify SSE ideas that contribute to the vision for urban circularity and can enrich the social and cultural sustainability of CE. We conclude that careful work is needed to put these two distinct approaches into a dialogue in relevant ways.
Purpose
Social media have become a key part of placemaking. Placemaking revolves around collaboration between multiple stakeholders, which requires ongoing two-way communication between local government and citizens. Although social media offer promising tools for local governments and public professionals in placemaking, they have not lived up to their potential. This paper aims to uncover the tensions and challenges that social media bring for public professionals at the street level in placemaking processes.
Design/methodology/approach
This study aims to fill this gap with a case study of area brokers engaged in online placemaking in Amsterdam. In total, 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, focusing on area brokers’ social media practices, perceptions and challenges. The authors used an open coding strategy in the first phase of coding. In the second phase, the authors regrouped codes in thematic categories with the use of sensitizing concepts derived from the theoretical review.
Findings
The use of social media for placemaking imposes demands on area brokers from three sides: the bureaucracy, the affordances of social media and affective publics. The paper unpacks pressures area brokers are under and the (emotional) labour they carry out to align policy and bureaucratic requirements with adequate communication needed in neighbourhood affairs on social media. The tensions and the multidimensionality of what is required explain the reluctance of area brokers to exploit the potential of social media in their work.
Originality/value
Several studies have addressed the use of social media in placemaking, but all neglected the perspective of street-level bureaucrats who shape the placemaking process in direct contact with citizens.
Declarations and manifestos have emerged across the world claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. Data-driven technologies in global cities not only have yielded techno-euphoria but also have intensified techno-political concerns as reflected in UN-Habitat’s flagship program called “People-Centered Smart Cities” (PCSC) that advocates the willingness to promote inclusiveness while subverting the technocratic smart city meaning. Against this backdrop, in 2018, the city councils of Barcelona, Amsterdam, and New York formed the Cities’ Coalition for Digital Rights (CCDR), an international network of cities—currently encompassing 49 cities—to promote globally citizens’ digital rights. Inspired by Arendt’s famous quote, this article explores what “the right to have digital rights” may currently mean, drawing on a sample consisting of 13 CCDR cities. Through action research to examine six digital rights-related factors, full findings revealed not only distinct strategies—related to AI adoption—but also common policy patterns in the 13 CCDR cities.
This chapter examines in-depth how the smart cities’ policy approach has been intensively implemented in European cities under the Horizon 2020 programme. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that smart cities’ policy implementations not only reduce the interdependencies among stakeholders to technocratic public-private-partnership (PPP) models but also fail to question the identities of strategic stakeholders and how they prioritise their business/social models. These aspects are increasingly putting democracy at stake in data-driven smart cities worldwide and particularly in European cities and regions. Therefore, this chapter aims to unfold and operationalise multi-stakeholders’ policy frameworks from the Social Innovation perspective by suggesting the ex novo Penta helix framework—including public, private, academia, civil society, and social entrepreneurs/activists—to extend the Triple and Quadruple helix frameworks. This chapter also applies the Penta helix framework comparatively in three follower cities of the H2020-Replicate project: Essen (Germany), Lausanne (Switzerland), and Nilüfer (Turkey).
This paper seeks to outline a methodological approach that can be used in order to help understand such movements, and more fundamentally, the role of community in Social Innovation (SI). The article offers an overview of Participative Action Research (PAR), and outlines its strengths and weaknesses in studying community-based social innovation, in this case the Transition movement. PAR is not an ‘off the shelf’ kit, or a ‘conforming of methodological standards’, but rather a series of approaches that ought to inform the research. The paper argues that these approaches, rather than techniques, are essential to get right if the intangible, granular, and incidental-but-fundamental aspects of community are to be grasped by researchers. Given the small-scale nature of community low carbon transitions a granular analysis is preferred to a more surface, superficial overview of such processes. Qualitative research is preferred to quantitative aggregation of initiatives, due to the need to understand the everyday, more phenomenological aspects of community, and the specific tacit relations and subjectivities enacted through their capacity to cut carbon.
There are many critiques of existing forms of urban governance as not fit for purpose. However, what alternatives might look like is equally contested. Coproduction is proposed as a response to address complex wicked issues. Achieving coproduction is a highly complex and daunting task. Bottom up approaches to the initiation of coproduced governance are seen as fruitful, including exemplification of utopian alternatives though local practices. New ways of seeing the role of conflict in participation are needed, including ways to institutionalise agonistic participatory practices. Coproduction in governance drives demands for forms of knowledge production that are themselves coproductive. New urban governing spaces need to be coproduced through participative transformation requiring experimentation and innovation in re-designing urban knowledge architectures. Future research in this field is proposed which is nuanced, grounded in explicit weightings of different democratic values, and which mediates between recognition of contingency and the ability to undertake comparative analysis.
The last years, calls surged for a transformation research, which addresses the increasing global environmental and social challenges and supports transformations towards sustainability. As transformation research developed rapidly in relation to various societal domains and established research strands, there is currently a need for self-reflection with regard to empirical and theoretical concepts, foci and frameworks. Especially the far-reaching ambitions of transformation research, namely to con-tribute actively to societal change processes towards sustainability, are controversially debated and need a critical reflection of research approaches and methods.
This working paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about transformation research. We argue that transformation research is not (yet) an established research field, but an emerging research per-spective that joins together different research streams focusing on societal change towards sustainability. We analyse the goals, contents, results and research approaches of this perspective as well as its social science methods. A specific focus of this paper is on the description and analysis of suitable methods for transformation research. We analyse social-science methods with regard to their contributions to the goals, results and research foci of transformation research as well as their use in de-scriptive-analytical and transformative research approaches.
In recent years, there have been substantial efforts towards theory-building and conceptual clarification in social innovation (SI) research further contributing to its consolidation as a research field. Taking a different angle, this special issue aims to contribute to such consolidation by introducing greater reflexivity about the underlying methodologies and logics of inquiry. It features eight contributions from the main methodological orientations in SI research, namely systematic knowledge development and action-oriented research that discuss particular methodological challenges and advances. This editorial synthesis serves to take stock and elicit their broader significance for SI research along the normative, temporal and comparative dimensions of methodology choices. Dimensions, which are salient to SI research without being tied to any specific methodological tradition. As such, they reflect our aim to transcend the methodological fragmentation of the SI research field and open up a methodological discussion through a methodologically pluralist stance.
This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovation that is able to provide empowering insights to practice, especially in terms of how social innovation interacts with transformative change processes. It identifies three ‘pitfalls’ that such theory-building needs to confront, and presents middle-range theory development, together with a focus on social relations and the processes of social innovation, as three elements of a theory-building strategy that responds to these pitfalls. In describing the implementation of this strategy in successive iterations between empirical case study research and integrative analysis, critical reflections are drawn on each of the three elements of the theory-building strategy. Taken together, these reflections underline the importance of maintaining a reflexive approach in developing new knowledge and theory on new social innovation.
Considering that it is important for the social innovation research field to confront its methodological challenges, this contribution addresses the challenge of choosing appropriate units of analysis. Invoking insights from actor-network theory, it is demonstrated that this challenge is pervasive: the agency in social innovation processes is distributed and therefore fundamentally difficult to detect and ascribe. This elusiveness becomes particularly pressing in attempts towards systematic comparison of cases. Critically evaluating the three main unit of analysis choices that guided an international comparison of 20 transnational SI networks and their local manifestations, methodological lessons are drawn on the agents that SI can be ascribed to, on the transnational agency through which it spreads and on the relevant transformation contexts involved.
This article argues that a critical urban studies needs to examine the reproduction of crisis in cities not
just at a macro level, but also in the day-to-day activities in urban administrations. Time and power are
implicated in frenetic activities in which officials find themselves beleaguered by the pace of change and
the opportunities for learning then evaporate. An urban imaginary, based on permanent possibilities
for the future, enables a culture of expertise to emerge that is at odds with democracy through a
separation between the forms of justification it deploys and the contexts of its application. That process
enables a spectator view of the urban that is fed by an antiseptic scientism in which models and
ideas for urban development circulate without sensitivity to context. The article calls for a movement
away from these narrowly constituted forms of knowledge production and reception to provide a
responsible politics through a more open and inclusive approach to urban development.
It is widely acknowledged that stakeholders’ relations are critical in collaborative planning. Hence, literature in this field has elaborated on the communicative and relational conditions that facilitate collaborative planning processes. Less attention has been paid to the dynamics of stakeholders’ relations and to how these influence planning processes. Analytical tools to systematically study stakeholders’ relating dynamics in collaborative planning processes are underdeveloped. Drawing on Baxter and Montgomery’s relational dialectics approach, we introduce an analytical framework to study stakeholders’ relating dynamics in collaborative planning and the way these interact with framing dynamics. We exemplify the core concepts of our framework with illustrations based on running case study research.
'The variety of approaches that claim to constitute practice-based research are several and varied. Silvia Gherardi cuts through the various approaches to address practice-based research as itself a practice in an invaluable guide for organization and management researchers. Written in a characteristically accessible style, this volume is an indispensable guide.' - Stewart Clegg, University of Technology Business School, Sydney, Australia.
In this article, we explore the potential of actor network theory and feminist material semiotics as a set of tools for critical policy analysis. We describe their focus on material heterogeneity, ontological multiplicity and performativity, and consider how this both generates political and policy possibilities and impossibilities and also creates the potential for change. We explore this by considering the British policy response to the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic, which we treat as a case of ontological multiplicity, and ask what might have happened if policy makers had recognized and responded to this multiplicity.
Scenario praxis, critically explored as the theory-informed practice of scenarioing, is proposed as a modality for institutionalising knowing within a systemic governance framework. Framing and institutional considerations associated with a constructivist inquiry-based learning approach that might open capacity for innovation in future scenarioing praxis are outlined to complement and counterbalance positivistoriented evidence-based approaches. Drawing on espoused theoretical and epistemological commitments, background literature, researcher experience, and our framing choices, we describe a heuristic device for use ex post to critically examine accounts of past scenario development, or ex ante to generate scenarios. The heuristic and its process of generation are designed for use in context-sensitive ways suited to the systemic governance of climate change adaptation and similar situations that can be framed as 'wicked' or uncertain.
This project has received funding from the European Union‖s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 612870. Acknowledgements
The challenges of sustainable development (and climate change and peak oil, in particular) demand system-wide transformations in sociotechnical systems of provision. An academic literature around coevolutionary innovation for sustainability has recently emerged as an attempt to understand the dynamics and directions of such sociotechnical transformations, which are termed 'sustainability transitions'. This literature has previously focused on market-based technological innovations. Here we apply it to a new context of civil-society-based social innovation and examine the role of community-based initiatives in a transition to a low-carbon sustainable economy in the UK. We present new empirical research from a study of the UK's Transition Towns movement (a 'grassroots innovation') and assess its attempts to grow and infl uence wider societal sociotechnical systems. By applying strategic niche management theory to this civil society context, we deliver theoretically informed practical recommendations for this movement to diff use beyond its niche: to foster deeper engagement with resourceful regime actors; to manage expectations more realistically by delivering tangible opportunities for action and participation; and to embrace a community-based, action-oriented model of social change (in preference to a cognitive theory of behaviour change). Furthermore, our study indicates areas where theory can be refi ned to better explain the growth and broader impacts of grassroots innovations —namely, through a fuller appreciation of the importance of internal niche processes, by understanding the important role of identity and group formation, and by resolving how social practices change in grassroots innovations.
Today’s society is facing a broad array of societal challenges, such as an unstable economic system, climate change and lasting poverty. There are no straightforward solutions, rather these challenges ask for fundamental societal changes, that is, sustainability transitions. Faced with the question of how these challenges can be understood and dealt with, we argue for action research as a promising approach. Focusing on their localized manifestations, we ask whether and how action research can support understanding and addressing societal challenges and making sustainability meaningful locally. We tackle this question on the basis of two case studies in local communities based on principles of transition management. Our main finding is that societal challenges, sustainability and sustainability transitions acquire meaning through practice and interactions in the local context. Action research can offer a space in which alternative ideas (e.g., knowledge, future visions), practices (e.g., practical experiments, transformative action) and social relations (e.g., new actors) can emerge to further a sustainability transition.
In this special issue, we start from the proposition that space, its uses and transformations are multi-significant and that their study requires an interdisciplinary approach. However, the elaborate division of labour in the sciences has also led to the compartmentalization of knowledge about space in different disciplinary fields with their associated, often idiosyncratic concepts, methods, and theoretical approaches. As a result, there is no shared conceptual system of space and different disciplines mobilize very different conceptions, perceptions, and experiences of space, often leading to mutual misunderstandings and incomprehension, also on the same terms (e.g. social space, urbanism). The development of a shared and interdisciplinary platform for the analysis of space, its use, and transformation is a way to address conceptual confusion. This special issue on the ‘Epistemology of space: exploring relational perspectives in planning, urbanism and architecture’ aims to contribute to the creation of such platform where relevant questions, concepts, theories, and methods will meet and ultimately synergize into an interdisciplinary relational understanding and analysis of space, its uses, and transformations.
Political scientists have started to focus on ‘practice’ as the smallest unit of analysis. Following a broader turn in the social sciences, the practice focus provides multiple advantages, including better conceptualizations of short-term social change, getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking, writing and doing politics, appropriate conceptualization of agency-structure dynamics, or forms of analysis resonating with other communities than scholarly ones. This contribution asks what the methodological implications of the practice turn are. It is argued that the practice focus does not only imply a certain ‘theory’ but also a certain methodology. I advance the term praxiography to speak about the forms of analysis produced by practice researchers. I discuss key guidelines of praxiographic research on two levels: first, general research strategies that provide empirical access points, second, guidelines for data collection in the frame of participant observation, expert interviews, and document analysis. I conclude in arguing that although praxiography is context driven, and hence requires to be tailored to the research problem, it is vital to reflect on the methodological repertoire of praxiographic research.
The topic of the article is practice theory. Using a detailed example from public administration, we first discus the shortcomings of the model of practice as applied knowledge that we have dubbed the Received View. The first half of the article is a chronology of successive adaptations of the Received View. These adaptations have gradually brought the Received View more in accordance with the practice-oriented critique in social theory and research of recent years. These adaptations fall short, however, of offering a theoretical account that explains the relationships among practice, knowledge, and context. These adaptations do not enable us to show, as we wish to do, how knowledge and context can be explained in terms of—and are evoked within—practice, and not the other way round—and that this transpires within real worlds each of which has its own unique constraints and affordances, histories and futures. In the second half of the article, we pick up on a relational conception of practice, knowledge, and context in which practice is distinct and primary. To develop this aspect of practice theory, we make use of some key concepts from modern Japanese philosophy. The nondualist posture of Japanese philosophy gives rise to a useful conceptualization of the dynamic and fluid relationships among practice, the characteristics of the situation at hand, and the epistemic elements of practice itself. In this final section, we introduce three concepts that help capture this dynamic, relational understanding of practice: “actionable understanding,” “ongoing business,” and “the eternally unfolding present.”
Innovation and community action are two important strands for sustainable development. Yet they have not hitherto been linked. Community action is a neglected, but potentially important, site of innovative activity. Bridging this divide offers a novel theoretical approach to the study of community-level action for sustainability. The opportunities presented by grassroots innovation are discussed, as are the challenges confronting activity at this level, and a new agenda for community-level sustainable development research and policy.
Over the past few decades, there has been a growing concern about the social and environmental risks which have come along with the progress achieved through a variety of mutually intertwined modernization processes. In recent years these concerns are transformed into a widely-shared sense of urgency, partly due to events such as the various pandemics threatening livestock, and increasing awareness of the risks and realities of climate change, and the energy and food crises. This sense of urgency includes an awareness that our entire social system is in need of fundamental transformation. But like the earlier transition between the 1750's and 1890's from a pre-modern to a modern industrial society, this second transition is also a contested one. Sustainable development is only one of many options. This book addresses the issue on how to understand the dynamics and governance of the second transition dynamics in order to ensure sustainable development. It will be necessary reading for students and scholars with an interest in sustainable development and long-term transformative change.
Since regular modes of knowledge production run the risk of reiterating and reinforcing current practices of unsustainable growth, the ambition of a sustainable development implies the need to design novel modes for ‘knowing what to do next.’ This article explores the notion of phronèsis as a potential heuristic for developing relevant knowledge generating practices. Three principles of phronètic knowledge production are outlined on the basis of the Aristotelian concept and Gadamer's theory of Philosophical Hermeneutics. The practical implications of these principles are explored by relating them to experiences gained with a Dutch experimental programme on stimulating sustainable development (dubbed NIDO), and its evaluation. The article relates how the research approach in the evaluation shifted from ‘exegetic hermeneutics’ to a dialogical design for interpretive research. It is argued that with this shift the evaluation project was bound to trigger what Forester (1999) dubs ‘transformative learning ‘ in a similar way the NIDO programme did. Because of the transformative powers inherent in a dialogical form of understanding, and the claims on revolutionary societal change inherent in the notion of sustainability, the articles concludes that designing knowledge production practices which F yield phronèsis may well prove quintessential in any attempt at stimulating fundamental, sustainable change.
This paper introduces a Special Topic on social innovation in the governance of urban communities. It also seeks to widen the debate on the meaning of social innovation both in social science theory and as a tool for empirical research on socioeconomic development and governance at the local level. This debate is organised around ALMOLIN—i.e. alternative models for local innovation as utilised in the SINGOCOM (social innovation in governance in (local) communities) research. The first section explains the role of social innovation in neighbourhood development and how it is best addressed from theoretical, historical and experience-oriented viewpoints. The second section provides a survey of the definitions of social innovation in a variety of social science fields, while the third section mobilises various strands of literature that will be of use for the analytical refinement of ALMOLIN. Section four illustrates how ALMOLIN is used as an analytical tool for empirical research. The final section shows some avenues for future research on social innovation.
This viewpoint presents insights on designing, engaging with and researching multi-stakeholder engagement spaces based on the experience of the ARTS project (2014–2016), active in five European cities also relevant for a broader European scale. We argue that those spaces represent an important new instrument of participatory governance that can elucidate the way different actors like community initiatives relate to and employ planning and policy contexts for working towards sustainable urban futures. The multi-stakeholder engagement spaces are analyzed regarding three functions they fulfill: co-creating new knowledge for action, making sense of contemporary transitions, and, exploring how sustainable solutions impact transitions. The lessons learned focus on the roles of different actors within those spaces as well as the link between the multi-stakeholder engagement spaces and a broader local context. We name three caveats including deeply entrenched mistrust between local transition initiatives and local government representatives, existing power imbalances and inclusivity.
Joint service delivery is a well-established aspect of urban governance but does not necessarily improve interagency collaboration or reduce socio-spatial deprivation. What happens in interactions between street level workers has a large influence on collaborative processes and outcomes but is remarkably underexplored. This article develops an understanding of the nature and impact of the relational practices enacted in street level collaboration. I argue that community-centred working can foster effective and authentic collaborative processes and, as a result, generate better societal outcomes. Based on a participatory evaluation conducted in Amsterdam, I critically appraise how working in and with communities moved collaborative dynamics in street level work away from habitual routines and power relations that sustained exclusion and inequality of local disadvantaged youngsters towards better internal relationships and less socio-spatial deprivation.
While current discourse promotes social innovation as a normative good, in practice it is highly contested by institutionalised ways of thinking, acting and organising. Concurrently stimulating and resisting innovation creates a ‘double bind’ of conflicting communicative signals that weaken capacities for joint sense making and sustainable change. I develop a meta-theoretical framework that explains what is involved in these relational dynamics of change and resistance, how these can be assessed and improved, and why the double bind both necessitates and inhibits substantive change. Analysing relational dynamics in a case of neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam, I argue that social innovators should be prepared to constructively confront rationalistic evaluation, defensiveness, and experiential detachment while institutional actors should welcome fundamental relational transformations of hierarchical and competitive dynamics institutionalised in urban governance.
Governance has been a key concept in urban studies since the late 1980s. This paper reflects on its use and development over the past 25 years and identifies contemporary innovations and concerns that will likely define the future of urban governance studies. The paper argues that to fully understand the impacts of governance approaches on our understanding of cities, urban regions and global urbanism, we must address how urbanism, rather than urbanisation, is governed. An attention to urbanism highlights a wider range of scholarly work on how the mutually constitutive relationships between the development of built environments and the identities, practices, struggles and opportunities of everyday social life are governed. In introducing 15 contributions from the archives of Urban Studies, the paper employs a heuristic framing – urban governance studies (UGS) 1.0, 2.0, and beyond – to show that, while governance as a contemporary critical concept gained prominence through the work of Marxian political economists concerned largely with urbanisation (UGS 1.0), other work, analysing the governance of other aspects of urbanism, including identity and citizenship (UGS 2.0), also has a significant history. The paper then points to ways in which urban governance studies grapple with future-defining challenges, such as climate change, and new framings, such as the ‘smart city’, while extending the scope of their analyses both temporally and spatially. The paper concludes by pointing to gaps and potential topics for ongoing attention.
Taking one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Barcelona as a paradigmatic case, the aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which contestation organised by sublocal grassroots movements in the context of the current urban crisis operates, both in terms of content and form of protest. Our thesis is that resident mobilisation in the neighbourhood of Ciutat Meridiana is expressive of a new cycle of (urban) social mobilisations in Spanish cities. In such mobilisations, more or less spontaneous initiatives which emerged to counteract the effects of the crisis at the community level are simultaneously serving as platforms for reciprocity and political contestation. Establishing a dialogue with the literature on social innovation, in this paper we claim that these micro-local urban practices are linked to broader social movements and thus play a fundamental role in the political empowerment of citizens living in highly segregated and vulnerable urban areas.
The article focuses on policy learning processes with the aim of sharing knowledge about how policy learning happens. In doing this, it considers conflict as a natural process in policy learning and proposes action research as a possible strategy to address it. By reflecting on a long-term action research process in the province of Gipuzkoa (Basque Country, Spain), the article proposes a change of focus in assessing the role of context. If we assume that policy learning is oriented towards changing the context, then context plays a more complex and important role than it is usually given in theory. At the core of this argument is the understanding that the cognitive frameworks of policy makers and researchers are also part of context and, when changing the context, participants in policy learning are involved in a change process which alters the very same cognitive frameworks that conditioned the initiation of policy learning.
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Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index
The local state, and more broadly the logic of the local, remains divorced from accounts of urban governance. Addressing this omission, this article examines how a focus on the local opens up new avenues of enquiry in urban governance. It first discusses the interactions of the urban' and the local', analysing the significance of both to an understanding of neoliberalism in action. It then evaluates the opportunities and challenges that emerge from the multiple interplays of the local' and the urban', setting out five focal points for the exploration of the local: understandings of crisis'; politics, meaning and affect; agency and regulatory intermediaries; the turn to practice; and place and comparison. The article concludes by calling for the study of local practices, in ways that recognise the multiple logics at play in different conjunctures, and the spaces such ambiguities and messiness' open up for different forms of situated agency.
This paper outlines the rationale for a research focus on how meaning emerges
from the interfaces between research, policy, and practice. In exploring where different
constructions of risk, resilience, and landscape occur in the policy and practice discourses
surrounding current developments in Victorian bushfire policy, this paper goes beyond
simply advocating better science–policy–practice relationships by demonstrating the
challenges of operationalising adaptive governance principles. Our findings stress that
change can arise from interacting discourses on the policy–practice interface. Yet, although
this may be the most adaptive moment in the policy process, producing multiple insights
and alternative options, it is vulnerable to institutionalised discourses that obstruct flexible
practice. Complex socioecological issues such as bushfire, we argue, require more explicit
engagement with the processes of practice inherent in policy formulation. The paper offers
coproductive research strategies as contributing to more flexible governance arrangements
to improve adaptive policy design
This article explores the characteristics of systemic action research. It looks at the conceptual underpinnings of systemic action research and explores some of the ways in which it differs from (builds on) other forms of action research. It then explores some of the issues and dilemmas faced by systemic action researchers.
The multilevel perspective and social practice theory have emerged as competing approaches for understanding the complexity of sociotechnical change. The relationship between these two diff erent camps has, on occasions, been antagonistic, but we argue that they are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, through empirical analysis of two diff erent case studies of sustainability innovation, we show that analyses that adopt only one of these theoretical lenses risk blindness to critical innovation dynamics. In particular, we identify various points of intersection between regimes and practices that can serve to prevent (or potentially facilitate) sustainability transitions. We conclude by suggesting some possible directions for further research that place these crossovers and intersections at the centre of analyses.
A refreshed and expanded understanding of experience can contribute to a relevant reassessment of the nature of practice and its relationship with knowledge and context. We characterise experience as essentially transactional, as entailing constitutive interaction with the elements
of the social, institutional and physical world. It is within this transactional experience – within the push and pull of the world – that practice addresses the constraints and affordances of what we know and the contexts within which we generate and deploy what we know. Practice
is animated by and within experience. Building on a concrete case of police work, we propose and explore three characteristics of the animation of practice by experience: 'actionable understanding', 'ongoing business' and 'the eternally unfolding present'.
Recent calls for a process-oriented public administration focus on the ontological and epistemological foundations of this approach and not on its methodological groundings. A full-fledged approach to understanding administrative practice as process requires critical examination of what kinds of methods are helpful to produce such knowledge. This article is a first attempt at conceptualizing a process-oriented methodology. It suggests that making sense of process calls for an actionable researcher who is responsive to the inherent resistances and affordances of the process of coproducing knowledge with policy actors, enabling them to act in response to the needs of problematic situations at hand. Although actionable researchers can draw on such approaches as action research and policy mediation, actionable research first and foremost comes down to attending to the emergent properties of the process of interacting with administrative practice.
Introduction: the modernist legacy in policy analysis From its inception in August Comte's positive social philosophy, policy analysis has been a vanguard of the modernist project, the pervasive cultural programme characteristic of the western world, to take rational, scientific control over the social and physical environment and shape it according to a preconceived ideal. One of the cornerstones of the modernist programme in public policy and social reform, specifically, is the opposition between theory and action. From Charles Merriam to Harold Lasswell's policy sciences, via the rational choice theorists to the progenitors of the public choice doctrine, the aim of policy analysis has been to bring the unstable, ideology-driven and conflict-ridden world of politics under the rule of rational, scientifically derived knowledge. To see this traditional approach to policy analysis – and the critique that we develop in this chapter – in the intellectual currents of our age, it is important to be aware that the theory/action dichotomy is not just a belief or a doctrine that one can adopt or abandon at will. Instead it is an element of a broad cultural institution; a self-evident, habitual and tenacious understanding of the way we ought to relate to the world around us, that informs our opinions, values and self-image. This stance, as a seemingly self-evident positioning of ourselves as human actors towards the world (and because of its many unexpected intellectual ramifications, there is no avoiding of some philosophical context here), is almost wholly and unrecognizedly couched in epistemological terms.
Prologue Part I. Practice: Introduction I 1. Meaning 2. Community 3. Learning 4. Boundary 5. Locality Coda I. Knowing in practice Part II. Identity: Introduction II 6. Identity in practice 7. Participation and non-participation 8. Modes of belonging 9. Identification and negotiability Coda II. Learning communities Conclusion: Introduction III 10. Learning architectures 11. Organizations 12. Education Epilogue.
This article works out the main characteristics of `practice theory', a type of social theory which has been sketched by such authors as Bourdieu, Giddens, Taylor, late Foucault and others. Practice theory is presented as a conceptual alternative to other forms of social and cultural theory, above all to culturalist mentalism, textualism and intersubjectivism. The article shows how practice theory and the three other cultural-theoretical vocabularies differ in their localization of the social and in their conceptualization of the body, mind, things, knowledge, discourse, structure/process and the agent.
This article reviews the influence of U.S. pragmatist philosophy on the development of theories about the nature, purpose, and method of planning. It outlines the key contributions of the pragmatist and “neo-pragmatist” philosophers and identifies the influence of pragmatism on early concepts of planning as a rational process; on the perspectives of Friedmann, Lindblom, and Schon; on the development of Forester's “critical pragmatism”; and on other planning theory contributions in the 1980s and 1990s. The article concludes by identifying the importance of pragmatist ideas in emphasizing the dimensions of planning as a practically situated, social learning activity, which should draw on the full range of human capacities and promote the ability for critical, transformative systemic framing work in the public sphere.
Discusses Vygotsky's (1934 [1962]) ideas about the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and extends them by inclusion of the theoretical constructs of situation definition, intersubjectivity, and semiotic mediation. Vygotsky's notion of the ZPD has recently spurred much interest among developmental and cognitive psychologists. His ideas have been incorporated into studies on a variety of issues, including intelligence testing, memory, and problem solving. It is argued that several conceptual issues must be clarified to understand and use Vygotsky's insightful but somewhat cryptic claims about the ZPD. The fundamental theoretical construct that is needed in this connection is that of situation definition. It must be recognized that one and the same setting can be represented or defined in several different ways. Such notions as object representation and action pattern should be used to analyze situation definitions. It must also be recognized that in the ZPD, more than one situation definition is involved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)