About 5 years ago, I was working with refugee communities in Istanbul that were settled in the dormant peripheries of the city. Imagine a neighbourhood in which the windows are lined with cardboard, and holes in the wall are covered with plastic plates. Visualize children bouncing on a discarded sofa, a pile of garbage right behind it, and a small courtyard ahead with a scratchy living area made of scrap materials. This scratchy living space soon turned into a library, a meeting place for women, and an art studio for children. In secluded urban spaces, certain self-sufficient social networks and unique financial mechanisms are formed in the city over time. Here, we can see the cases of strong solidarity toward meeting the needs of the community such as bartering furniture and kitchen equipment or taking care of the children of working single mothers in shifts.

Here, urban social innovation emerges as a grassroots movement in areas that have to be self-sufficient and do not have relatively equal opportunities with the rest of the city, which is not a unique example, especially in megacities like Istanbul.

Although innovation and social innovation are popular notions in the last 10 years, they have many aspects that are not understood. In Türkiye, the common perception towards innovation is that there are product and service-oriented initiatives that reject traditional ways of doing business or that can only be available for a particular class in society. When “city” is included in this equation, the relationship between city, social and innovation often turns into a vague and cool term where concepts are lost in each other.

We can consider cities as "social laboratories" as Park defines, or as a network of trade and financial chains made up of interconnected global cities, as Sassen says. However, cities considered as “living organisms”, have long been associated with innovation and creativity.

In this sense, the city is seen as an innovation center that enables networking, gathers production and creative ideas, and includes financial and social opportunities.[1] The concept of urban social innovation reveals different relationships and organizational forms, ranging from projects where high-tech industry is developed, for-profit enterprises are tested in the city and “social” is a testbed, to applications where “social” is a one-way service area led by the state through official institutions and organizations.[2]

It is argued that urban social innovation has greater capacity in the economically advanced areas of the city, where resources and connections are greater than in poorer neighbourhoods. However, as in the story I mentioned at the beginning of my article, urban social innovation is also defined as “new ideas that simultaneously meet social needs and create social support networks” that is community-based approaches.

The city provides space for forms of solidarity and action that simultaneously address needs and foster empowerment.

Looking at social innovation from this perspective, I have encountered many unique solutions in different urban contexts including solidarity spaces from community banks to anti-evacuation campaigns, ecological initiatives from community gardens to energy cooperatives, alternative economies from social finance to consumer cooperatives, and autonomous management of abandoned spaces. Especially some of these initiatives present clear examples of grassroots innovation that started as a movement such as Kuzguncuk Garden, or searching new ways to live together like Roof Coliving, or CBOs as Çiğdemim Association, which have been established by neighbourhood residents for more than 25 years. Interestingly, some of the urban innovation ideas may emerge in social media platforms as WhatsApp or Ayrancı Ahalisi Facebook group in which more than 1000 people participate. Although these communities operate in certain urban contexts, they are all innovating by finding new ways to provide services or manage resources.

Kuzguncuk Garden