دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی یک تحقیق تجربی از ابتکارات نوآوری اجتماعی برای توسعه شهری پایدار - الزویر 2017

ABSTRACT

Recent literature on social innovation highlights its conceptual ambiguity and emphasizes how technology has contributed to the renovation of this 200 year old practice, calling for more sector-specific research. Addressing this call, this paper examines how social innovation fits in the urban sustainability discourse and in what way it empowers urban citizens and their communities towards serving their interests. The findings with respect to 29 cases of social innovation initiatives for environmental sustainability across 9 domains suggest that a large spectrum of sustainability challenges and topics are addressed by existing initiatives, which in turn can refer to different urban spatialities. For each initiative we examine the social innovation process, focusing on the types of involved organizations, the underlying innovation mechanisms as well as the use of technology. In terms of citizen empowerment, we examine the empowerment mode, the main beneficiaries of the innovation, as well as the specific outcome of the initiative. Following this analysis, we arrive to the identification and description of four primary citizen profiles in social innovation for sustainable urban development. We close by calling for further research into the perception, behavior and needs that are associated with the identified citizen profiles and their communities.

5. Conclusions

In this paper we presented a short review of the social innovation literature, focusing on the relationship between social innovation and sustainable urban development. We explored how off-the-shelf and bespoke technology has allowed the growth of people networks, and expanded the outreach of social innovation initiatives in the field of sustainability. By researching 29 cases across nine domains that emerged through the social innovation literature, and by analysing them comparatively, we detected four types of citizen profiles in the sustainability discourse: the ‘citizen-sensor’, the ‘sharing citizen’, the ‘collaborative citizen’ and the ‘entrepreneurial citizen’.

The foremost observation to make from the above analysis is related to the roles citizens acquire in the social innovation for sustainability discourse. Building upon the existing body of literature that explores the social aspect of innovation in terms of process and empowerment, we maintain that different citizen roles imply different capabilities and interrelations and, therefore, different dynamics for the social innovation ecosystem. In addition, these citizen roles are highly dependent on the type of ICTs and the way these tools are used. The blurred boundaries between users/consumers and producers and the emergence of “prosumers”11; as an expression of this blur, have been significantly encouraged by the extended use of ICT (Manzini, 2007; Millard et al., 2013; Wallin, Horelli, & Saad-Sulonen, 2010). However, this relation between citizen roles and ICTs needs to be further investigated. The current research stands for a first attempt to investigate this relation between citizen and ICTs, identifying citizen profiles in the area of social innovation regarding environmental sustainability.