Supporting Urban Innovators’ Reflective Practice

Abstract

Over the past years, a growing number of local initiatives are generating solutions for societal challenges in their cities. However, the scale and complexity of these challenges force urban innovators to constantly adapt and learn, having to acquire new capabilities that will help them advance towards systemic change. In the current work, we take the premise that these urban innovators need to be able to utilise the urban context as a learning ecosystem in order to push their interventions beyond the boundaries of small innovative niches. In keeping with Schön’s reflective practice, we envisage reflection as a core competence for these urban change makers to grow and present a reflective process supporting urban innovators in framing their professional learning journey to succeed in their projects. A series of online sessions have been conducted to investigate how to scaffold a reflective process enabling innovators to better identify challenges in their projects and the corresponding capabilities they need to acquire. In the proposed paper, we present reflective activities as a tool supporting urban innovators in self-defining their learning journeys and elaborate on the insights gained. It can be concluded that the reflective process we developed was valuable to urban innovators in unveiling new learning needs for their projects, while further research is needed to more effectively translate these learnings into actionable steps to sustain innovators’ self-development.