Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

Urban sustainability approaches focusing on a wide range of topics such as infrastructure and
mobility, green construction and neighbourhood planning, or urban nature and green amenities
have attracted scholarly interest for over three decades. Recent debates on the role of cities in
climate change mitigation have triggered new attempts to conceptually and methodologically
grasp the cross-sectorial and cross-level interplay of enrolled actors. Within these debates, urban
and economic geographers have increasingly adopted co-evolutionary approaches such as the
social studies of technology (SST or ‘transition studies’). Their plea for more spatial sensitivity of
the transition approach has led to promising proposals to adapt geographic perspectives to case
studies on urban sustainability. This paper advocates engagement with recent work in urban studies,
specifically policy mobility, to explore conceptual and methodological synergies. It emphasises
four strengths of an integrated approach: (1) a broadened understanding of innovations that
emphasises not only processes of knowledge generation but also of knowledge transfer through
(2) processes of learning, adaptation and mutation, (3) a relational understanding of the origin and
dissemination of innovations focused on the complex nature of cities and (4) the importance of
individual actors as agents of change and analytical scale that highlights social processes of innovation.
The notion of urban assemblages further allows the operationalisation of both the relational
embeddedness of local policies as well as their cross-sectoral actor constellations.