Can Neighbourhoods Save the City?

"A common criticism of edited volumes is that they can sometimes be little more than a loosely connected series of chapters. However, Can Neighbourhoods Save the City does not fall into this trap. Not only are the empirical chapters, which form the body of the book, connected through a commonly considered analytical framework, but a solid narrative draws the reader through from conception to conclusion. Ultimately, it is clear that sub-city initiatives provide hugely generative sites of social cohesion that co-exist alongside official state-driven forms of city governance. Many of these initiatives are not new, although the invocation of innovation and enterprise within their analysis may not have been so emphasised in previous eras."Professor Anna Davies, Trinity College Dublin

Frank Moulaert is Professor of Spatial Planning at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Visiting Professor at Newcastle University (Planning Department) and MESHE (CNRS, Lille, France). Flavia Martinelli is professor of Analysis of territorial systems at the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, Italy. She works on the dynamics of socioeconomic development and disparities at the local, regional, international scale and on actions to govern territorial transformations and support the development of depressed areas. Sara Gonzalez is Lecturer in Human Critical Geography at the School of Geography, University of Leeds and the Spanish editor of ACME. Her research focuses on issues around urban political economy, territorial governance and uneven development particularly in European cities. Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester University. He has published extensively on urban political economy and urban political ecology, urban governance, and socio-spatial theory.

1. Social Innovation and Community Development: Concepts and Theories 2. Historical Roots of Social Change: Philosophies and Movements 3. ALMOLIN: How to Analyse Social Innovation at the Local Level 4. Kommunales Forum Wedding Innovation in Local Governance in Berlin 5. Arts Factory, Rhondda Cynon Taff, South Wales 6. Social Exclusion/Inclusion and Innovation in the Neighbourhood of Epeule (Roubaix). The Case of the Association Alentour 7. The End of Social Innovation in Urban Development Strategies? Neighbourhood Development Corporations in Antwerp 8. How do you Build a Shared Interest? Olinda - a Case of Social Innovation Between Strategy and Organizational Learning in Milano 9. Centro Sociale Leoncavallo - Milan - Italy. A building-block for an Enlarged Citizenship in Milan 10. Associazione Quartieri Spagnoli (AQS) - Naples 11. New Deal for Communities in Newcastle 12. The Ouseburn Valley. A Struggle to Innovate in the Context of a Weak Local State 13. The Contradictions of Controlled Modernisation: Local Area Management in Vienna 14. Self-determined Urban Interventions as Tools for Social Innovation: The Case of City Mine(d) in Brussels 15. Creative Designing the Urban Future: Building on Experiences - A Transversal Analysis of Socially Innovative Case-Studies 16. Socially Innovative Projects, Governance Dynamics and Urban Change: A Policy Framework