Now, the name of the programme may imply it is a strictly European affair – why should the international community around the Urban Transformations Journal care? The fact that JPI Urban Europe collaborates with the Belmont Forum, that it develops bilateral calls with China, and Latin American and ‘South’ countries express interest in joining the regular call activity (see Fig. 2), has made JPI Urban Europe certain that the concerns around the dilemmas and issues outlined in the updated agenda are not restricted to the European setting. In a sense, the research and innovation programming agenda is a knowledge diplomacy mechanism within and beyond Europe since it is used as an intermediary to search out and shape common goals and directions to move urban research innovation in joint undertakings.
During the last 8 years, JPI Urban Europe has moved its programming beyond being a mere ‘call machine’ to support at the same time a transnational innovation ecosystem or network of urban transition activities and approaches as well as local urban settings with their transitioning. On the one hand, this stems from the fact that JPI Urban Europe (as with all the JPIs) is a new instrument and its programming is explorative, not to say innovative, in its own right in the context of research and innovation funding. That is, while calling for challenge-driven research and innovation with a strong emphasis on transdisciplinary co-creative approaches in local urban settings, JPI Urban Europe itself has had to figure out how to have funding agencies work together and trust each other, how to partner with the EC, how to make the various events by and in collaboration with JPI Urban Europe more knowledge generating and active learning for all involved rather than simply a long row of statements and presentations. On the other hand, the European Commission itself – to address the research and innovation needs in urban sustainability transitions – requires the network organisation to be reflexive beyond call technicalities, at the very least since the field of urban research and innovation is very diverse and fragmented in clusters of various disciplinary and sectoral foci. It may not always be obvious to actors outside these inner workings, but there is a sense that those of us who work with programming aspects (e.g. strategic relations, thematic content, communication and stakeholder involvement) also have to learn and ‘be the change you want to see’ as much as possible.
The JPI Urban Europe focus is on various transition pathways to push for urban transformations overall without using a one-size-fits-all approach. By transition pathways and urban transformations, which are at times seemingly used synonymously in policy communications, JPI Urban Europe relies mainly on the distinction made by Hölscher et al. (2018: 2), i.e. they are not mutually exclusive but do refer to different scopes and systemic perspectives: transitions concern ‘the processes and dynamics producing patterns of change’ in societal sub-systems while transformations denote a more overarching view on larger scale changes in societies and efforts to understand them ‘from emergent patterns of change’ and their ‘outcomes at a systemic level.’ JPI Urban Europe harbours a project portfolio directed towards shaping a critical mass in knowledge provision to urban transition pathways with the ultimate aim to support urban transformations (cf. Kabisch et al. 2019). However, as the portfolio grows, this also requires more and innovative strategic syntheses both in terms of results and in terms of how to understand the challenges for stakeholders.
The SRIA update may seem a bit early. After all, the previous SRIA ran for 2020 and still had a lot to give, so to speak, when it comes to urban transition pathways and thematic priorities. Nevertheless, the SRIA 2.0 update was foreseen almost from the launch of SRIA 2015. A relatively speedy recommencement of the scoping work was intended and started already in 2016. It was foreseen since the UN Agenda 2030 and the SDGs were in the pipeline and launched shortly after, the Paris Agreement on Climate Action (COP 21), the UN-HABITAT ‘New Urban Agenda’ were also published, and the work to shape/implement the Urban Agenda for the EU (UAEU; which is the first general and joint urban policy in the history of this region!) was commenced. A couple of rather important international policy documents in terms of giving policy a direction and articulating the general challenges and priorities concerning sustainable development and urban futures. The update was hence needed to specify how JPI Urban Europe should respond and support the achievement of the aims set out in these policies regarding sustainable urbanisation. Furthermore, JPI Urban Europe also quickly realised that SRIA 2015 did not adequately address the issue of the contemporary fragmented landscape of urban research and innovation and policy (cf. De Jong et al. 2015) that required some reflection by an urban symposia series since it is a key issue in terms of understanding and supporting the variegated urban transition pathways to move towards urban transformations.
How JPI Urban Europe developed the SRIA 2.0
JPI Urban Europe launched its updated SRIA in February 2019 (JPI Urban Europe 2019). It was preceded by hectic work reflecting on the messy urban development dynamics in practice and on a wide set of consultations, ranging from global and EU level stakeholders over national and regional, to local, researcher, commercial, civil society stakeholder groups. The following is reconstruction of the SRIA development along a timeline (see Fig. 2) that, even if historical and not a prescribed procedural regulation on drafting, more or less reflects the standard of the kinds of turns this type of programme development takes in JPI Urban Europe.
Although, who were the movers? Primarily the Management Board, which was tasked to draft the update for the Governing Board. In 2017 the Governing Board had just developed a long-term strategy in more funding policy technical terms on the JPI Urban Europe vision, main achievements, and future goals concerning the societal challenge of sustainable urbanisation for 2020–2026 (JPI Urban Europe: Vision, main achievements and future goals 2020–2026, Unpublished). This document served as a backbone to the agenda update. The main direction in how to support this in all its complexity is that JPI Urban Europe has the ambition to:
… become a well-recognised source of knowledge for informing European and international urban policies. The next development phase of JPI UE thus has to focus on activities that respond to real urban needs and strengthen the implementation of research results. To better meet societal and cities’ needs, JPI UE in all its activities will strive to mobilise urban stakeholders, to co-create ideas and solutions and support mutual learning. For realising urban transitions and enhancing impact of the investments, JPI UE needs to contribute to capacity building in urban planning, management, (regional, national, EU, and international) policy making and society at large. (JPI Urban Europe 2017: 3–4)
Unfortunately for this paper, there was not much drama involved in the drafting of the agenda update. It was of course exciting for us who were in the middle of steering and exploring the European landscape of issues and actors on all levels. But the below may read more as a list of stops on a highway trip. Although it was not a particularly rationalist planning process either. In a way, this resembles the classic argument in planning studies on that much of planning is neither very conflictive nor rational but more similar to the ‘muddling through’ in ‘successive limited comparisons’ (cf. Lindblom 1959).
However, the formal timeline for the SRIA 2.0 development starts with commissioning a task to the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB; see Fig. 3). This task consists in shaping a position paper with recommendations around issues such as: what does the international policies related to sustainable urbanisation entail and how do they affect urban research and innovation? How could JPI Urban Europe contribute with research and innovation in the best possible way? SAB started drafting a position paper on the scientific warrants of an updated agenda (published as Kabisch et al. 2019) mainly by aiming to support the UN Agenda 2030 SDG 11 implementation.
Next, the Management Board asked the Urban Europe Research Alliance (UERA) for recommendations and advice on what themes and issues the agenda should address. The UERA is driven by research institutions and organisations across Europe. Their input was detailed and thorough.
These first two steps would then characterise the first phase of the agenda development as a scoping exercise by scientific and research actors. However, at the same time, the Management Board opened up an interface for public and stakeholder input as a general and open web-based consultation. The input ranged from high and low, conceptual abstractions to simple concrete concerns and recommendations. There were researchers, NGOs, but also interest organisations in and around Brussels such as Eurocities, and global ones such as ICLEI. This openness was risky, since the operative principle ofthe Management Board holds it important to make sure all input is somehow reflected, even if not all of it may be recognised as taken into account from any specific actors’ point of view.
In the second phase, this horizontal co-creation approach was taken a step further as the processing of the public consultation, after a slight ‘calibrating’ or ‘rough mix’ (as music sound engineers put it) by the Management Board, took place at an AGORA Forum event in Bucharest, April 2018. This became a key milestone. About 80–100 participants, mainly researchers, but also stakeholders from other categories such as business, policy-makers, civil society, from all over Europe. Future Earth, ministries, researchers from projects funded by JPI Urban Europe. For 2 days, this entailed working with professional facilitation to braid, quilt, and work the material through stakeholder exchange and dialogues, back and forth, to shape issue areas. Through successive iterations on questions and then sets of questions and concerns, revisioning, rephrasing, the large stakeholder group sorted out the most pressing issues (Fig. 4).
From the AGORA Forum discussions in Bucharest and the output generated, the Management Board distilled the results from it, five thematic areas and some implementation issues. After an outline write-up, it was time to report and query the Governing Board on directions. This resulted in ‘ok, go!’ for a consultation along the lines of national communities and stakeholders, i.e. the National Contact Points in JPI Urban Europe would bring the ‘memo’ to its urban research and innovation community and ask them for comments, ideas, input, etc.
Then the European Commission (EC), which has an ‘interservice’ group on urban matters across its departments (Directorate General) as well as the Joint Research Centre (JRC) were consulted. As a further and crucial alignment of the agenda, the question also went out to the Urban Agenda for the EU Partnerships (UAEU) for their view on the agenda update. These partnerships consist mainly of city authority representatives, although not excluding civil society, business, and research actors.
The outline and ‘prototype’ were at the same time refined and reflected upon by academic research in an Urban Transitions Pathways Symposium (UTPS) in the fall 2018. During discussions and workshops with the material, it became clear the Management Board had to scrap one of the themes and integrate some of the core concerns in the remaining four. This concerned the theme outlining a friction between liveability and (technical) functionality. It became obvious that it required too much conceptual support to make the point (in the sense that the statements generally required quite a lot of academic contextualisation in order to travel across stakeholder groups) that was heard throughout the online consultation and in the AGORA.
Finally, there are four main themes in the SRIA 2.0 update: 1) Digital transitions in urban governance; 2) From resilience to urban robustness; 3) Urban infrastructures; 4) Inclusive public spaces. These themes are understood as dilemmas, that is as wicked issues that appear in-between actors.Footnote 3 Dilemmas are hence boundary objects that serve as communication interfaces for a wider range of stakeholders and affected publics, groups, etc. Hence, the dilemma-driven approach is a way to work towards four prioritised future orientations for urban transformation research, e.g. as identified by Wolfram et al. (2016: 23–24). To tackle dilemmas we need radical innovation, or perhaps rather that approach of tackling dilemmas will generate radical (systemic) innovation that allows addressing the complexities and cross-cutting issues that characterise urban transformations.
The time for drafting was tight and the SRIA 2.0 was launched in Brussels already in February 2019 at a high-level policy conference. The development had been done with the sense to increase opportunities for input by various types of stakeholders, from EC to small social innovation actors on a neighbourhood level. For us who will use it as an instrument to guide programming but also to communicate concerns for the wider policy community in Europe and internationally to mobilise around, one of the positive outcomes from this ambition is that we still register different voices (such as network organisations or policy actors) that reflect the complexities involved in urban transformations. Particularly the dilemma-driven approach that developed out of the process seems to make a difference in this policy community, in that it presents more of the frictions involved, which is recognised to reflect a higher degree of ‘truthfulness’ in representing the messy practical circumstances and wicked issues on the ground.
It is for these reasons that the SRIA 2.0 develops a dilemma-driven approach and, in retrospect, suggests a transition arena framework (Loorbach 2010) to implement the programming and support urban transformations. The transnational transition arena is a way to understand or perform an urban innovation ecosystem that works beyond national boundaries. It is an ongoing constructive approach that has been underway the last 10 years. Broadly speaking it is to ‘connect the dots’ in the dense and diverse network of urban transition research and initiatives characterised above but also to support capacity building in the intentional absence of a ‘new paradigm’. Connecting the dots is a strategic principle and transition arena hypothesis in JPI Urban Europe that holds the wish to increase and shape better communication in-between the various clusters of research fields, sectors, and silos that currently work in paralleland that tend to fragment the field of urban transformations by having different epistemological practices, ontological understandings, and (academic) capital interests to hinder the effective workings of a single paradigm (cf. Bylund 2017).
