Reconfiguring Urban Sustainability Transitions, Analysing Multiplicity
By Mike Hodson, Frank W. Geels, Andrew McMeekin. 2017
202 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cities, and the networked infrastructures that sustain urban life, are seen as crucial sites for creating more sustainable futures. Yet, although there are many plans, the realisation of sustainable urban infrastructures on the ground is uneven. To develop better ways of understanding why this is the case, the paper makes a conceptual contribution by engaging with current understanding of urban sustainability transitions, using urban sustainable mobility as a reference point. It extends these insights to argue that urban transitions are not about technological or social innovation per se, but about how multiple innovations are experimented with, combined and reconfigured in existing urban contexts and how such processes are governed. There are potentially many ways in which urban sustainable mobility can be reconfigured contextually. Innovation is in the particular form of reconfiguration rather than individual technologies. To make analytical sense of this multiplicity, a preliminary framework is developed that offers the potential to think about urban transitions as contextual and reconfigurational. We argue that there is a need to embrace multiplicity and to understand its relationships to forms of reconfiguration, through empirical exploration and further theoretical and conceptual development. The preliminary framework is a contribution to doing so and we set out future directions for research.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management of Technology and Innovation, Media Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f25bc184305bd76f310b9cadb0928536dccd613
How researchers see this paper
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Management of Technology and Innovation
- Michaela Trippl
- Franz Tödtling
- Markus Grillitsch
- Ron A. Boschma
- Arne Isaksen
- Teis Hansen
- Bjørn T. Asheim
- Patrick Lehner
In Media Technology
Citations in the corpus
- New directions for RIS studies and policies in the face of grand societal challenges (2021, background): “Thus, the transformation of the mobility sector is reconfigurational (Hodson et al. 2017).”
- Regional innovation policies for new path development – beyond neo-liberal and traditional systemic views (2018, background): “…regime variants and examining to what extent and in which ways different types of regions may be used for niche development and experimentation with novel solutions also rank high on current research agendas (see, for instance, Hodson, Geels, & McMeekin, 2017; Späth & Rohracher, 2012).”