
During the Green week in Brussels, CoR organized the Conference „Social Innovation for Accelerating Transition to Sustainable Cities“ on 30th May 2016.
Cities are homes of innovative solutions and alternative social arrangements. Social innovations come in many forms, including nature-based solutions and people-based solutions that hand in hand transform our cities, district-by-district, one infrastructure service at a time. These actor-networks that we call transition initiatives come in various shapes and sizes, led by actors from public, private and civil society sectors or spanning across sectoral divides, and have become increasingly visible in many European cities. Transition initiatives as makers of social innovations in cities foster new relationships, new institutions and, ultimately, can contribute to the emergence of new urban realities: the sharing economy, green low-carbon economies, and new sustainable lifestyles.
Whereas the question was how to discover these transition initiatives and the solutions they put in place, research efforts1 now discovered that the proliferation of those initiatives in cities raises new questions for place-making and overall city-making. Looking at the evidenced impact in cities that sustainability initiatives from civil society and from partnerships bring about, we come to question what we can learn about accelerating urban sustainability transitions and facilitating a transition to low-carbon economy, with new types of green jobs and welfare state models.
In this seminar participants had interactively debated about the key messages for policy, practice and education as synthesized across 6 research projects that look at social innovation and the way it plays out in facilitating and accelerating low-carbon transitions to sustainability in cities.
