Transformation Rooms: Building Transformative Capacity for European Cities

Introduction

A key global and thus European challenge is to radically transform how cities function and improve their resilience to certain social, economic and environmental impacts. Cities are viewed as the key to (environmental) sustainability and associated radical systemic change. This relates to sustainability performance targets in terms of both quality of life and long-term ecosystem health (Wolfram & Frantzeskaki 2016).

In cities across Europe, social innovation and urban grassroots niches also serve as important drivers of transformation dynamics (Wolfram 2016; Wolfram & Frantzeskaki, 2016). Interest in social innovation is growing (Moulaert 2013) and more and more citizens are taking action in the form of many different innovative measures. Stronger citizen involvement in decision-making is an important aspect of new urban governance; new models of participation are needed and their consequences for urban administration, the economy and governance have to be understood. Newig and Koontz (2014) argue that the European Union (EU) seeks to compensate its perceived lack of democratic legitimacy and responsiveness by involving citizens and private actors (e.g. Water Framework Directive 2000). With its unprecedented requirements for new local planning and decision-making processes, participatory governance has already been heavily impacting public administrations and can be an important driver for transregional and transnational urban transformation (Simmons et al 2018; Fröhlich et al 2014, Newig & Kvarda 2012, Healey 2004). Furthermore, the lack of horizontal co-ordination, co-operation, and collaboration, or acceptance between vertical departments is a well-known issue in organisations and projects, and a common problem in the implementation of sustainable smart city projects (BEEM-UP 2014; R2CITIES 2016; ECOSOC 2016 and many others).

Cities and citizens attempting to effect sustainable change face the challenge that transformation is inherently a systemic phenomenon, as it results from the continuous interaction between different actors, institutions, organisations and levels (Freeman 2006). Cities do not change in isolation but rather in interaction with their (systemic) environments, which are complex by nature and impossible to shape in the sense of managing transformation in a predictable top-down manner. These system changes are labelled ‘socio-technical’ because they not only entail new technologies, but also changes in markets, user practices, policy and cultural meanings (Geels 2004). Socio-technical transitions towards sustainability do not come about easily, because existing energy, transport, housing and agri-food systems are stabilised by lock-in mechanisms related to sunk investments, behavioural patterns, vested interests, infrastructure, favourable subsidies and regulations (Unruh 2000).

Urban governance relates to the capacity to ‘configure’ metropolitan development (Neuvonen & Ache 2017) in general and increasingly collaborative planning opens spaces of participatory governance where participatory experiences have a transformative effect on societal spaces and actors (Zientara et al. 2020) and forward-looking and participatory (planning) policies and practices to aid (strategic) higher-order learning and thus desired impact.

Transformative change towards sustainable development paths can be seen as “multi-actor processes, which entail interactions between social groups” (Geels et al. 2010: 11). They are also “multi-level” processes which provide an overall view of the multi-dimensional complexity of changes in socio-technical systems (Geels 2004, Geels & Schot 2007). The multi-level perspective (MLP) distinguishes three analytical levels of structuration and stability – niche, regime, and landscape. While the ‘regime’ is considered to be a “semi-coherent set of rules carried by different social groups” (Geels 2002: 1260), ‘niche’ refers to the space for radical innovations and ‘landscape’ refers to the exogenous, wider context. The regime is said to orient and coordinate the activities of social groups that replicate the various elements of socio-technical systems.