Reflecting on the role of social innovation in urban policy

Urban policy has long been criticised on two fronts: first, for concentrating on a ‘standard set’ of interventions which constantly reinvent what has gone before, and second, because partnerships and networks established to deliver urban policy initiatives often exclude actors and are fraught with difficulties owing to issues of power and conflict. Together, these criticisms amount to a major challenge for the management of urban policy and the delivery of novel ways of thinking and working in the field. Since 1997, when New Labour came to power in the UK, only modest inroads have been made in addressing structural inequalities and uneven spatial and social development. In light of this legacy, this paper argues that closer attention needs to be paid to the ways in which knowledge is produced and transferred within and between partnerships and networks, given the core role that knowledge plays in fostering social innovations. In addition, it explores the impact that the ‘slicing and dicing’ of policy across scales has on the production and transfer of knowledge, and how this, itself a form of ‘spatially contrived randomness’, is deployed as a form of meta-governance of urban policy actors which limits their ‘scope at scale’ and ultimately the transfer of ideas and new ways of working in urban policy arenas.