How City‐networks are Shaping and Failing Innovations in Urban Institutions for Sustainability and Resilience
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12758 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
How City-networks are Shaping and Failing
Innovations in Urban Institutions for
Sustainability and Resilience
Niki Frantzeskaki
Swinburne University of Technology
Abstract
The seminal piece of Davidson, Coenen and Gleeson gives a good overview of the role of C40 as a global intermediary for
establishing networked governance and knowledge brokerage of cities. The identified benefits for cities participating and even
driving city networks are well presented, however require a closer conceptual and empirical development that also considers
evidence and reflection from the institutional work of other transnational networks such as ICLEI, Climate Alliance, Asian Cli-
mate Change Cities Resilience Network, 100 Resilience Cities as well as the Covenant of Mayors and UCLG. In this response
article we extend the conceptualization of the benefits and risks for the roles of city-networks as curators of institutional
spaces for co-creation and knowledge co-production to respond to the third theme of Davidson, Coenen and Gleeson paper
on the ways that city networks shape urban institutions.
Cities engage in policy-science dialogues and policy-
community-business interfaces about climate change pres-
sures and challenges as well as about thinking for solutions
(Fuhr et al, 2019). The last decade has seen the rise of many
policy-relevant concepts that entered the discourse and
framed urban policy and planning agendas such as sustain-
ability, urban resilience, and experimentation. All these con-
cepts and associated frameworks and approaches require
intense and continuous dialogue, curation and facilitation of
an open process to ideas, interests and concerns for being
embedded to city specific needs and urban institutions. In
earlier work, we argued that there is a value in institutional
spaces that allow such processes of co-creation of new
urban imaginaries and of co-producing actionable knowl-
edge to inform local action. These institutional spaces are
conditions and outputs of innovative urban governance and
are organized and/or initiated by city networks (Kemmerzell,
2018) and scientists at both local and global levels (Frantzes-
kaki and Rok, 2018). In this response article, we focus on the
role of city networks in influencing urban institutions and in
shaping and failing to innovate urban institutions through
the curation, organization and facilitation of institutional
spaces for co-creation and knowledge co-production to
respond to the third theme of Davidson, Coenen and Bellin-
son paper on the ways that city networks shape urban insti-
tutions.
1. City networks shape innovations in urban
institutions
City networks shape urban institutions and particular inno-
vations in urban institutions by: (1) democratizing planning
through the curation, facilitation and sustaining of co-cre-
ation processes in cities; (2) depolitization of (urgent and
pressing) urban issues, and (3) institutionalization of evi-
dence-based and knowledge-based solutions to strengthen
urban agendas.
First, co-creation as an open process to ideation, solution
co-design and agenda co-formulation is argued of having
several advantages to traditional participatory planning
approaches especially about democratizing planning further.
What, however, receives attention is the way co-creation
innovates urban governance by connecting different urban
actors through the openness and inclusivity to ideas, mind-
sets and aspirations and moving away from identifying
‘stakes’and ‘interests’as entry and selection criteria to pro-
cesses of planning. In this advancing of urban governance,
city networks play a catalytic role.
A response to ‘A Decade of C40: Research Insights and
Agendas for City Networks’,
Kathryn Davidson, Lars Coenen, Brendan Gleeson*
*Davidson, K., Coenen, L., and Gleeson, B. (2019), ‘A Decade of C40:
Research Insights and Agendas for City Networks’, Global Policy, 10
(4), 697–708.
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12758
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019
712
Special Section Article
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