pavel sebastian's List: city, urbanism

• One should distinguish innovation from pure evolutionary change and the adaptive responses to new technologies, within the established rules and procedures. Innovation implies creative pro-action to structural change. It comprises a managerial and institutional response to the opportunities offered by new technology. Its main sources are necessity or choice: for example, scarcity, pure accident, defence, crisis or creative conflict. It can also be strategy-driven.
• Innovation theory starts by distinguishing innovation from invention, at the one end, and transformation and diffusion, at the other. It involves a dramatic and thorough change that widens the horizon of capabilities and a catalytic organisational restructuring that allows the new product, concept or idea to bring about the required transformation. Invention is often identified with the research and development of a product or idea, while innovation includes all the politics of its adaptation. An old world of principles, ideas and patterns dies while a new one is born. The cutting edge is where innovation lies, but it is more a process than an event. It encompasses all processes that lead to the transformation. It needs planning, foresight and strategic choices.
• passage from ego-citizens to eco-citizens and socio-citizens
• Martinotti suggests that there are at least three urban formations intermeshed in the territorial reality: the traditional city with its physical and institutional morphology and its sociological entity, the mid-20th century metropolis, dominated by a centre (core)�periphery (fringes) morphology, and finally a new World city, a Global city or Exopolis, an open network with plural nodes. The coexistence and superimposition of these three "urban layers" creates new social orders that are undergoing a deep mutation (EF 1997a, Ascher 1995).

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