Urban Innovation for Global Climate and Sustainability Goals

Urban innovation has emerged as a priority to address global climate and sustainability goals. Cities concentrate people, knowledge and resources to drive innovation, but the idea of ‘urban innovation’ as a directed activity to discover new ways to develop, manage and inhabit cities in more sustainable ways is recent, distinct and less clearly understood. This paper charts the emergence of urban innovation as a discrete and influential policy goal to deliver global climate and sustainability goals. It identifies three modes of urban innovation: innovation in cities, innovation by cities and innovation for cities, setting out the characteristics of each. Accelerating sustainable urban transformations requires these three modes to be brought more closely together in both practice and theory.