Networking analysis in the urban context: Novel instrument for managing the urban transition

Nowadays, the insurgence of shocks in every dimension of life is questioning the effect of globalization on the urbanization process. The exposition to risks, related to the impact of continuous environmental and economic shocks, seems, in turn, increasingly connected to high urbanization processes. Among a variety of specific vulnerability factors that can influence the life of the population in each settlement, two sources of them seem to be generalized: Higher levels of income inequality spread in urban areas, the concentration of knowledge complexity in large cities. Traditional urbanization theory has become hard to interpret these changes on a global scale, and “innovation” is a core concept to explain the new differences in the urbanization dynamics. The paper aims to combine urban and innovation policy towards the post-Europe 2020 Strategy, as a scientific advance in urban and regional studies within innovation policy design. It is argued that this combination is a crucial need due to the pivotal role that the city is acquiring in managing adaptation to shocks and in designing new approaches in line with the Just Transition mechanism introduced by the European Union. The paper argues that in light of a completely new scenario of development, especially after the pandemic, due to the necessity to make a transition towards sustainability, the traditional approach of analyzing the context to drive the political choices of transition need to change. Data analytics is acquiring importance in the decision making that required to be faster due to the continuous and unpredictable shocks are facing us. The technological progress, the engine of development is crucial in driving cities and territories towards a transition to a post-carbon economy. Since the city transition is not formal top-down management, the network modeling of this structure and the complexity of the component would be an exciting approach. Network analysis, both as a tool to measure the change and as a new framework for urban management, could play an essential role for policymakers to develop a responsive dashboard that benefits from local data to generate place sensitive materials for decisions. The urban system is consistently facing turbulence which leads politicians to convert them to a path to analysis, this point of translating the routine tensions into the challenges following a pattern of emergence and remedies to a cure are resilience building. Defining urban resilience in city level is double-sided sward however it grasps the prosperity of the innovation tightly, but would stem educational shields for fresh ideas required incubators to grow. The expected result is to explain how applying the networking analysis at the urban level can change the perspective of urban planning, create an Ex-ante mechanism based on network modeling for policymakers to foresight trajectories based on their decision could depict an utterly novel approach in urban management tools.