Cities shaping grassroots niches for sustainability transitions: Conceptual reflections and an exploratory case study Marc Wolfram Yonsei University, Department of Urban Planning and Engineering, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Sinchon-dong,120-749 Seoul, South Korea article info Article history: Received 26 September 2015 Received in revised form 31 July 2016 Accepted 9 August 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Cities Grassroots niche Social innovation Place Urban policy Urban governance abstract This paper discusses the crucial role cities play in the emergence and formation of grassroots socio- technical niches for sustainability transitions. Drawing on research engaged with strategic niche man- agement, grassroots innovations and urban social innovations, it conceptualizes the interdependencies between urban contexts and grassroots niche dynamics, and explores a critical case in point: Current policy efforts in the city of Seoul to create, diversify and network social innovations in urban neigh- borhoods. The analysis illustrates the specific characteristics of innovative place-making activities in everyday-life urban environs and how empowerment, proximity and institutional thickness enable them to meet basic conditions for niche formation in terms of networking, shared expectations and social learning, while also raising new questions of inclusion, legitimacy and strategy. In conclusion, four issues are highlighted that appear to decisively impact on the formation of urban grassroots niche and related sustainability transition pathways: 1) Urban empowerment capacities, 2) Embedded holistic innovation, 3) Novel community-oriented governance modes, and 4) Urban niche/regime interactions. These issues thus require particular attention in future research and policy in order to guide the coevolution of cities and urban grassroots initiatives towards sustainability. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Cities are critical hotspots for socio-technical system transitions towards sustainability. This is not only due to their quantitative importance in an urbanizing world, but also, and perhaps more importantly, regarding their role as incubators and catalysts of socio-economic and environmental change (Mumford, 1961; Jacobs, 1970; Douglas, 2010). It is essentially urban patterns of production and consumption, social interaction, as well as cultural practice that drive global flows of people, materials and informa- tion (Weinstein and Turner, 2012; Elmqvist, 2013; Vojnovic, 2014). Correspondingly, cities are also the places where all systems of provision that today require radical transformation eventually coalesce (McCormick et al., 2013). Research on cities and socio-technical transitions has developed a strong focus on urban infrastructure systems, examining how cities shape and are shaped by their transformation under condi- tions of global environmental change and economic destabilization (Guyet al., 2001, 2011; Monstadt, 2009; Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Bulkeley et al., 2011). This has illuminated why and how actors at various scales engage in new forms of governance arrangements and local experimentation in order to reconfigure urban energy, water, waste or transport systems (Berkhout et al., 2010; Bai et al., 2010; Coutard and Rutherford, 2010; Hodson and Marvin, 2012; Sp€ ath and Rohracher, 2012; Hamann and April 2013; Cast an Broto and Bulkeley, 2013; Hodson et al., 2013; Moloney and Horne, 2015). Nevertheless, other urban dimensions of socio-technical change and related experiments have so far remained largely underexplored. In particular, studies of grassroots innovations and niche for- mation (Seyfang and Smith, 2007; Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013), as well as urban social innovation (MacCallum et al., 2009; Moulaert et al., 2010) point towards implications of cities for the way in which citizens and local civil society actors get involved in the spatially embedded reproduction of socio-technical regimes and/or creation of sustainability innovations (cf. Bulkeley et al., 2014; Baker and Mehmood, 2015). Urban contexts enable and require the social and physical interconnection or ‘bundling’ (Shove et al., 2012) of diverse social practices that (de-)stabilize not only single systems, but ‘multi-regime’ configurations (Smith et al., 2010; Papachristos et al., 2013; Næss and Vogel, 2012; Mizuguchi et al., E-mail address: m.wolfram@yonsei.ac.kr. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.08.044 0959-6526/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2016) 1e13 Please cite this article in press as: Wolfram, M., Cities shaping grassroots niches for sustainability transitions: Conceptual reflections and an exploratory case study, Journal of Cleaner Production (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.08.044