Cities as platforms in energy transitions: Case Positive Energy Districts

Cities hold a strategic role in the emergence of sustainable, decentralized, and fossil-free energy systems, including positive energy districts (PEDs). Within this urban transformation, a ecosystems and value-based views are being adopted since no actor alone can promote a systemic change. This presents a challenge, as it necessitates profound shifts in the socio-technical systems, and detachment from hierarchical and sector-specific siloes to foster the emergence of social innovations. The main contribution of this study is the introduction of three distinct roles (strategic, operative, tactical) cities can adopt to enable synergistic and dynamic forms of value co-creation between the public and private actors. A multi-level perspective using illustrative case examples at three (micro, meso, macro) levels of aggregation is adopted, to better understand to processes and practices behind social innovation.