Which ‘Game Changers’ for which ‘innovation’? Actors, competencies, and behaviors in ‘innovative’ planning and design competitions.

Reinventing Cities (RC) is a competition organized by the C40 Cities Climate leadership group – an international network of cities created in 2005 to respond to the global climate crisis. Member cities share the will to implement innovative policies and solutions to environmental challenges. Indeed, it appears as a globally shared perspective on how to keep together environmental objectives and urban development, meaning high environmental performance, high-quality architecture, and diffuse collective advantages. In fact, since its first launch in the mid-2010s, this design competition emphasized its ‘innovative’ aims and implementation modalities. A key component of this ‘new’ way to conceive urban transformations are the actors, which are expected to imagine, design, and realize urban innovative solutions through ‘new’ multidisciplinary groups with ad hoc configurations. Overall, RC21 calls show high expectations of private actors, for their (alleged) capacity to mobilize funds, knowledge, and competencies, and to provide creative solutions. At the same time, public actors still seem to play a decisive role, starting with e.g. the choice of the sites and essential regulations: the ‘rule of the game’ appears to be public. Indeed, actors emerge as a main issue when analyzing what is shared among the different cities, what relies on the success of this call, and what is produced in the different localities: with their different origins, scope, and behavior on the one side, but also with some common traits on the other: e.g. their (supposed) ‘new’ inclination and capacity to build alliances (and what kind of alliances they build) to reach the defined goal; some standardized interpretation of ‘green transition’ and ‘urban sustainability’. Thus, we will present here the preliminary results of our ongoing research (Gomes et al. 2022; Bruzzese 2022; Dang Vu & Pizzo, 2022) that considers the calls launched in different cities in Europe (Paris, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Oslo, and Reykjavik) focusing on actors. Our interest here is to show if, how, and to what extent RC21 calls have produced the expected innovation looking in particular at actors, actors’ relations, knowledge, and skills mobilized, considering the urban projects produced and comparing: actors involved; actors’ relations; group dimension and main related features such as: international/national/local; newly, purposedly constituted/already active; financial/investment capacity; competencies: multidisciplinary/specialized; presence of prestigious professional or design teams; ancillary staff members specifically devoted to coordination and management; which interpretation of green transition and sustainability do they convey and contribute to circulating. To do so, we are adopting mixed methods, such as desk research focusing mainly on the analysis of the documents produced for the calls in the cities mentioned above, and their winning projects’ presentations; on-site direct analyses and interviews.