ABSTRACT
This book focuses on the analysis of social innovation dynamics at the ‘local’ level, and especially within neighbourhoods and local communities, as an integral and vital part of wider urban dynamics. In the first chapter, we reviewed different theories of social innovation and situated our own under standing of this concept within different strands of the literature and in connection with the notion of community. In the second chapter, we traced the historical roots of social movements in Europe as a key to understanding some of the features and dynamics of our contemporary socially innovative experiences. This third chapter, then, attempts to bridge those theoretical and historical discussions with the empirical case study chapters that will be presented in the remainder of the book. To this end, it spells out the analytical framework that we mobilised to identify dynamics of social innovation at the local level.
