Sustainability and Cities as Systems of Innovation

Cities often constitute relevant environments for interactive learning and innovation potentially capable of tackling sustainability problems. In this paper we ask if the concept of systems of innovation can increase our understanding of city dynamics and help promoting the sustainable development of cities. Through a combination of the innovation system approach and the perspective of creative cities, we argue that a slightly modified concept – sustainable city systems of innovation – may be helpful in this context. To underline this, we discuss certain ‘city-traits’ of sustainability and conclude that the new concept may be of special use for urban quality development and management.