Design-Driven Innovation in Urban Context—Exploring the Sustainable Development of City Design Weeks

As the imperative of sustainable development of cities has gained heightened attention within the global creative and cultural industries in the last decade, among all the relevant trials and practices, city design weeks are becoming a notable method offering diverse possibilities for the innovative approaches the cities could apply to their development. Therefore, the objective of the research is to understand how city design weeks facilitate urban sustainable development and how design-driven innovation is implemented in such a context. Employing a qualitative methodology, the study conducts a case study across 30 global design weeks, selected through a cross-validated process with the World Design Weeks global network and UNESCO City of Design network. Grounded in the design-driven innovation perspective, valid data from 2017 to 2022 is gathered in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) primarily through extensive interviews, official project reports, and media communication materials. The data are further cross-analysed by adapting the Creative Cities Index into 10 indicators suitable for the context of design weeks. Among the research findings, three types of design-driven models emerge for the innovation practice of city design weeks: metropolitan integrative transformation and innovation, inclusive cultural diversity communion and innovation, and cluster incorporation and collaborative innovation. In this way, the study provides both the practical significance in terms of supporting the design week organisation by implementing suitable approaches to drive the city’s sustainable development and the theoretical significance in extending the possible adaptation of a design-driven innovation model for the urban development context. Furthermore, the limitation of this qualitative study opens avenues for future quantitative impact analyses on individual design weeks, providing applicable evaluation methods to iteratively inspect and refine the models over time, which complement the limitations of the current qualitative research.