Governing urban sustainability transitions through participatory urbanism in post-industrial South Bend, Indiana

Urban sustainability transitions require cities to combine political leadership and commitment, long-term planning, experimentation, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive governance. Research in transition management (TM) has largely focused on early-stage niche experimentation or long-term transition, offering limited insight into how municipalities govern transitions once emerging practices are embedded within institutional frameworks. This article examines how South Bend, Indiana, a mid-sized post-industrial city in the United States, pursued a sustainability transition through mobility and public space transformations between 1992 and 2024. Drawing on an exploratory case study, the analysis identifies three governance modes – (1) long-term strategic planning, (2) short-term experimentation, and (3) co-creative partnerships and four governance mechanisms – (1) collaborative knowledge production, (2) participatory urbanism, (3) innovative institutional design, and (4) reflexive learning. Together, these elements illustrate how municipalities can operationalize a development-by-design logic, using experimentation, stakeholder participation, and iterative learning to design and scale transformative urban practices. Our empirical findings contribute to TM theory in three ways. First, the simultaneous operation of governance modes in South Bend illustrates that we can better understand TM phase models as a typology of coexisting governance logics than as a stepwise process of development. Second, development-by-design logics can be deliberately institutionalized through a combination of governance mechanisms, rather than left to emerge from niche experimentation. Finally, governance-driven transitions create structural second-order tensions of their own, including exclusion, inequity, and private influence, which cannot be resolved by the governance mechanisms that produced them. This points to the need for framework adaptations that connect how cities govern transitions with the progress that those transitions have made.