Urban Regeneration: Organizing Creativity, Innovation, and Change

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on the organizational dimensions of urban regeneration, emphasizing how creativity, innovation, and change are mobilized, structured, and institutionalized within regeneration processes. Moving beyond purely spatial or policy-oriented analyses, the Special Issue foregrounds the organizational practices, governance mechanisms, and institutional work that shape the regeneration of urban spaces.

The Special Issue invites interdisciplinary contributions that engage with urban regeneration through the lenses of organizational theory, public management, institutional sociology, urban studies, and planning theory. Key areas of interest include, but are not limited to, creative governance, collaborative planning, the role of hybrid organizations, temporality and change in regeneration projects, leadership and agency in urban innovation, the tensions between control and experimentation, and the economic and financial assessment of urban regeneration projects.

We welcome empirical studies (qualitative, ethnographic, case-based, and comparative), conceptual papers, and theoretical syntheses that explore the following topics:

• How creativity is organized and governed in regeneration processes;
• How innovation emerges from, or is constrained by, institutional arrangements;
• How actors mobilize change across public, private, and civic sectors;
• How regeneration projects balance experimentation with accountability;
• How economic and financial assessments are integrated into the governance and planning of urban regeneration projects;
• What implications these assessments have for innovation, accountability, and long-term sustainability.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to deepen our understanding of urban regeneration, not just as a technical or policy challenge, but as a socially organized and contested process involving multiple actors, logics, and narratives. By putting creativity and innovation at the center, we seek to highlight the emergent, messy, and often paradoxical nature of regeneration work. This Special issue aims to bridge practice and theory by showcasing how creativity and innovation are not merely outputs but processes deeply embedded in organizational settings.

Therefore, this Special Issue seeks to meaningfully supplement the existing literature by bridging gaps between urban studies, planning theory, and organizational research. While urban regeneration has been extensively studied from spatial, economic, and policy perspectives (e.g., Roberts & Sykes, 2000; Couch et al., 2011), less attention has been paid to the organizational processes and institutional work that underpin regeneration initiatives. At the same time, the literature on organizational studies has developed robust frameworks around creativity, innovation, institutional entrepreneurship, and organizational change (e.g., Greenwood et al., 2011; Battilana et al., 2009), yet these insights are rarely applied to urban contexts. This Special Issue also aims to bring these strands together by analyzing how creativity is not only a design or cultural goal of urban regeneration but also a collectively organized and governed process. Furthermore, the Special Issue responds to calls in the urban governance literature to better understand the messy, emergent, and often contested dynamics of collaborative and experimental governance (e.g., Ansell & Gash, 2008; Bulkeley et al., 2016), showing how innovation is shaped by institutional logics, actor networks, and power asymmetries. In doing so, the Special Issue positions itself as a timely and critical contribution to both theory and practice, offering a richer, more processual understanding of how cities are regenerated through organized efforts of change.

Dr. Alessandra Ricciardelli
Dr. Alessandro Cariello
Dr. Paola Amoruso
Dr. Felicia Di Liddo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Urban Science is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• organizational change
• leadership and agency
• innovation processes
• collaborative planning
• civic wealth creation