Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eist Original Research Paper Conceptualising the built environment to inform sustainable urban transitions Joshua Nielsen ⁎ , Megan A. Farrelly School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Sustainability transitions Sustainable urban transformations Built environment Urban studies Urban planning Agency ABSTRACT Despite the prominence of cities within sustainability transitions, the scholarship has been cri- ticised for its lack of engagement with spatiality. This article engages with physical change in urban environments through a critical scholarly review of interdisciplinary scholarship. This paper deconstructs conceptualisations of the built environment and identifies the similarities, contestations and unaddressed components in conceptualising the built environment across urban morphology, spatial-political economy, urban planning, and urban design. Following this, the paper reconstructs the built environment, reflecting on sustainability transitions scholarship. The analysis highlights this physicality as a necessary component for consideration when pre- paring any form of systemic urban change, especially when attempting to understand multi- sectoral transitions. Overall, the review reveals the need for a future research agenda that ex- plicitly explores the role of the built environment and its creators in influencing multi-sectoral sustainability transitions. 1. Introduction Cities are increasingly recognised as complex systems - the result of emergent processes, bottom up development, and influenced by human and natural drivers (Batty and Marshall, 2012; Webb et al., 2017). Understanding the multi-level and multi-phase dy- namics of these complex systems has been framed by socio-technical (Geels and Schot, 2010; Smith et al., 2005) and socio-ecological (Folke et al., 2005; Walker et al., 2004) transitions studies. Concepts from sustainability transitions and sustainable urban trans- formations (understood as a subset of sustainability transitions, see Ernst et al. (2015))offer insights into the dynamics of purposive, systemic, long-term, and vision-led, societal shifts towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption (McCormick et al., 2013). However, given the importance of cities as sites of sustainability transitions, Coenen et al. (2012) have criticised the scholarship for its lack of engagement with spatiality in transitions, revealing an area ripe for exploration. In response, human geography scholars have explicitly examined the spatiality of cities through the urban as the context of sustainability transitions (Fastenrath et al., 2018; McCormick et al., 2013; Truffer et al., 2015). The majority of this work attempts to improve comparability between geographically distinct transitions and better account for the spatial and context specific factors that influence the pace of urban transitions (Coenen et al., 2012). In a similar divergence from ‘traditional’ sustainability transitions perspectives, the city as the object of transition (Næss and Vogel, 2012), has also begun to be explored by engaging with the implications of physical space/s in cities and how these relate to sustainability transitions (Ryan, 2013). For the purpose of this article, we understand the city as an object as a collection of physical https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.07.001 Received 3 February 2019; Received in revised form 9 July 2019; Accepted 11 July 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: joshua.nielsen@monash.edu (J. Nielsen). Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 2210-4224/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Joshua Nielsen and Megan A. Farrelly, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.07.001