This open access book represents one of the key milestones of DESIGNSCAPES an H2020 CSA
(Coordination and Support Action) research project funded by the European Commission under the
Call User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation. The book
demonstrates that adopting design allows us to embed innovation within the city so as to arrive
at feasible answers to complex global challenges. In this way innovation can become disruptive
while also sparking a dynamic of gradual change in the urbanscape it acts within. To explore
this potential the book puts forward the concept of design enabled innovation in urban
environments and examines the part that the city can play in promoting and facilitating the
adoption of design among public and private sector innovators. This leads to a potential
evaluation framework in which a given urbanscape is assessed both in terms of its capacity for
generating innovation and of the nature (more or less design-dependent or design-prone) of the
innovative initiatives it hosts. This thread of reasoning holds many promising implications
including a possible third way between those who dream of an alternative economic model where
revenues and growth are sacrificed on the altar of social and environmental respect and the
supporters of the traditional market-based view who feel it is enough to add a touch of
responsibility and concern to a system that should continue rewarding the profitability of
innovations.
