This paper investigates how public sector institutions change their form and approach to achieve a socially innovative urban governance. The “Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics” (MONUM) in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) proves a representative case of innovation in the public sector. As a new type of government agency, it is essentially an open innovation lab dedicated to innovative evidence-based policymaking. Following a new dynamic organizational pattern in urban governance, MONUM is conducive to project-oriented social innovation practices and horizontal multi-sectoral collaboration among the three societal sectors: public, private, and civil. Its results suggest that first, the peculiarity of MONUM lies in its hybrid and boundary-blurring nature. Second, new institutional forms that experiment with urban governance can rely on multi-sectoral collaboration. Third, MONUM has experimented with a systemic approach to social innovation following the “design thinking theory.” The MONUM case can contribute to the current debate in Europe on the need to harmonize EU policies for an effective social inclusion by promoting the application of the place-sensitive approach.

The paper proposes that the issue related to an emerging inequality in advanced democracies due to the knowledge-based economy is partially argued in...

The widening of regional disparities remains a critical concern in the political and academic debate at global scale. Given the scope of the phenomenon, recent evidence indicates how growing regional divergences are increasingly jeopardizing social cohesion, fueling inequalities even within regions. The dichotomy between less developed and core regions seems to lose the centrality in the political agenda. An example is provided by the new geography of knowledge that is giving rise to a complex divergence that rests also on the different internal regional contexts’ conditions. Regions are exposed to multidimensional shocks and stresses questioning territories’ resilience and their ability to manage the transition process. The paper argues that regions need to enhance their resilience to transition-induced shock (dynamics) understanding this internal complex divergence. The paper introduces the multiscale approach as a dynamic factor in the policy-making process to capture the sensitiveness of places to adaptation, resilience-oriented performance, and the disruption of path dependency - which may be considered as the main obstacle for an equitable distribution of competitive advantage derived from innovation - and lead the post-carbon transition required by the European Green Deal. The analysis conducted rests on the conceptual framework of the Open Access Toolkit conceived for the TREnD Research Project funded by the Horizon 2020 Program. The conceptual framework adopted, underpinned by sets of indicators that couple context conditions with innovation performance, can be used to explore and identify in further studies EU settings that are more exposed to systemic risks associated with the transition process.

As a worldwide phenomenon, rural-urban divide is the fundamental reason for socioeconomic disparities between rural and urban areas within the same region. To achieve sustainable regional development, it is important to foster rural-urban linkages so as to coordinate rural and urban development. This research is aimed to investigating the reasons for rural-urban divide and suggesting how to address it. To this end, based on literature review and the American context, the research first analyzes the ideology and the political economic dynamics behind rural-urban divide. Then, it looks into how a shift from binarism towards polarism can address rural-urban divide and at the meantime foster rural-urban linkages. Finally, with reference to empirical examples from Boston, the research discusses how rural knowledge outflows in the form of urban farming can contribute to the formation of rural-urban linkages.