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.

Urban transition is gaining relevance in the academic and policy debate for rethinking urban development strategies toward resilience and sustainability. The transformative power of innovation and knowledge is called upon to speed up the process. In this paper, we address the issue of urban transition by exploring how the urban innovation ecosystem is a crucial factor in operationalizing city transition strategies. For this scope, we propose a methodological approach to identify the city-level innovation ecosystem by connecting innovation dynamics with urban transformation. The objective is to highlight how transition dynamics are spurred by the urban innovation ecosystem in its maturity stage. Therefore, the paper proposes a case study of the Boston area (the cities of Boston and Cambridge, USA) where it is possible to detect a mature urban innovation ecosystem. The case analysis unveiled the urban characterizing factors of the innovation ecosystem. Here, the concentration of innovation activities stimulates the demand for urban transformations, which are managed through urban planning and zoning and specific supportive policy-planning initiatives.

Community-based urban development is an inclusive approach for local service provision and management centered on the proactive partnerships between urban communities and local governments. Rooted in the deinstitutionalization of public services, the European Union and national policy effort is pushing towards the organization of community-based alternatives in response to the evolving needs of local communities. As the pandemic has shown, service accessibility has proven to be a key concern element that needs to be addressed to increase communities’ and cities’ resilience. In this direction, the paper aims to propose data-driven alternative approaches to assess urban systems’ accessibility and connectivity as an element of leveraging the resilience-oriented planning process and facilitating community-based development. The methodological approach focuses on the case of the Calabria region, where community-based alternatives for the provision of public services found difficulties to be operationalized through an integrated planning approach. The case study is explored by experimenting on the spatial connections of two purposefully selected clusters to assess the accessibility and connectivity of urban systems within the region through network analysis visualization tools: health and social-related services and transportation and logistics. The analytical approach outlines the accessibility level of urban systems in the region examined, proving its relevance in detecting social, economic, and environmental dynamics. This approach shows how using non-traditional data-driven perspectives can detect development dynamics—which affect local community’s needs—and their limitations in the organization of community-based development alternatives.

The paper aimed at exploring the role of local industrial clusters as a part of an important evidence-based pathway for operationalizing smart specialization policy. Hitherto, the scientific debate has been largely focused on the relationship of clusters with the local business environment to boost competitiveness and has mostly searched for the operationalization of smart specialization policy in economically successful regions. However, the understanding of the role of local clusters (LCs), in terms of cluster industries that serve local businesses and residents, as potential “building-blocks” of Smart Specialization Strategies (S3) still lacks interpretive studies. We proposed a conceptual framework to unveil those factors of LCs that may be enhanced in the S3 policy design, around the concepts of adaptiveness and responsiveness to structural and influencing features of a local economic system. The distinction between Local and Traded clusters, applied in the US context, allows the identification of Local Cluster performance because of the availability of a robust data set. Accordingly, a tool is proposed to investigate those factors that are likely empowering smart specialization strategies: The dynamic SWOT analysis on the case of San Diego provides interesting insights toward building this conceptual framework. The findings may help explain how to relate LCs with smart specialization as building-blocks, based on potential risks and opportunities associated with the local economic system.

This paper explores data-driven planning approaches for measuring urban ecosystem services in cities by focusing on the potential of big data. In the face of the ecological and digital transition, technologies’ advancements, big data, and innovative analytical approaches offer novel perspectives on capturing the dynamic interactions within urban ecosystems and contribute to the definition of data-driven planning approaches for the transition of cities. The paper outlines possible approaches to integrating diverse open data sources to gain comprehensive insights into urban ecosystem services measurement in cities by exploiting satellite images and remote sensing technologies in a case study area. For this purpose, two commonly used vegetation indexes have been used, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and the Leaf Area Index, combined with Land Use data following the urban informatics approach. Results show the potential of data-driven approaches for planning the transition of cities towards sustainability and resilience and the implications of such data and technologies for urban planning and governance.