The impact of participatory governance on regional development pathways: Citizen-driven Smart, Green and Inclusive Urbanism in the Brainport Metropolitan Region

Abstract

Urban innovation policies reintroduce the role of social entrepreneurs and civil society into innovation studies with regard to the governance of regional innovation and the emergence of new innovation pathways. The research approach integrates the concepts of urban and regional transformation, participatory governance and works with an actor-centered approach that employs the enactment of innovation models by actor constellations such as the smart city concept and the Triple Helix model. We illustrate the pathway of a citizen-driven approach in innovation for the case of Brainport smart district in the city of Helmond, in the metropolitan high-tech region Eindhoven in The Netherlands. The empirical data is obtained in a real-world laboratory (rwl) in a multi-stakeholder co-creation process. The case contributes to the categorization of citizen-driven innovation pathways within an extended approach of Economic Evolutionary Geography (eeg) and thus to the frame of reference for structural dynamics in social theory.