ABSTRACT
The distinctiveness of sustainability transitions in cities is reflected in the diverse and complex dynamics present and the unfitness of single frameworks to explain them. Urban sustainability transitions call for a certain theoretical promiscuity that enables a broader engagement with diverse ways of understanding and approaching the urban. By summarizing this contribution, this chapter elucidates what an urban perspective brings to the broader field of transitions to sustainability. First, comparing urban transitions with transitions in societal domains like food, health, energy and mobility, to which earlier volumes in this series were devoted is that urban transitions require a different unit of analysis. Second, and even more fundamentally, this unit of analysis is a place. Cities are thus both places of physical proximity and generally well 'placed' to enable linkages to other physical spaces. The chapter seeks to bring together these insights by focusing on the idea of cities as relational places.
