How governance and policy enable innovation in the built environment: Insights from TOP SEC

Introduction

Urban innovation is often imagined as a spark of genius, a disruptive technology or a pioneering design that rewrites the rules of city-making. But innovation in the built environment, particularly in the service of sustainable urban development, is rarely the product of isolated brilliance. Instead, it is deeply entwined with policy frameworks, governance cultures, and institutional capacities that allow complex urban systems to evolve in adaptive, resilient ways.

This insight is vividly embodied in TOP-SEC, an ambitious project led by the Area Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB) co-funded by the European Urban Initiative, committed to turning grey roofs into biodiverse environments (read more here). Rather than approaching innovation as a standalone technological fix, TOP-SEC shows how policy can foster process-based innovation—that is, innovation that emerges through collaboration across administrative silos, long-term visioning, and coordinated governance. For cities seeking to transform their built environments, the TOP-SEC journey offers valuable lessons. Funded by the project and taking place during its lifespan, three transfer cities – namely Toulouse Metropole, Borough 9 of Rome and Petroupoli – will take this socio-technical transition journey.

The Policy-Innovation Nexus

Innovation does not arise in a vacuum. It is enabled (and other times constrained) by the policy environment. Urban policies that are forward-thinking, integrative, and inclusive can create fertile ground for novel approaches. These include frameworks that support experimentation, prioritise co-benefits across sectors, and establish governance mechanisms to manage complexity.

The TOP-SEC project demonstrates this clearly. Instead of seeing rooftops merely as underutilised spatial surfaces, the project reimagines them as spaces for circular economy, ecological restoration and climate resilience. But the transformative potential of this idea lies not just in its technical integration, i.e. how to make them more biodiverse; rather, it lies in the institutional innovation that lays the foundation to make it operational.

AMB’s policy stance actively promotes cross-sectoral governance, involving urban planners, social services, climate experts, and local communities. This institutional “architecture” allows innovation to emerge from dialogue and negotiation, rather than top-down imposition. Specifically:

• Managing waste is becoming a transversal challenge for the AMB. The organic fraction is seen as an opportunity to create value-added products, contributing to the development of a more sustainable and circular territory.

• The Sustainability Protocol of AMB offers the strategic lens to promote such integration. As such, policy becomes not only a regulatory tool but a platform for coordination, helping the city to adapt its built environments in ways that are structurally and socially sustainable.

From grey infrastructure to renatured roofscapes

TOP-SEC’s approach to renaturing the roofscape of Metropolitan Barcelona is particularly significant given the Mediterranean context—marked by heat stress, high urban density, and uneven access to green infrastructure. Roofs will be transformed through planting native species that will thrive without irrigation, making them an ideal solution for water-scarce Mediterranean cities. They will be developed using locally sourced materials, including biochar obtained as a by-product of municipal organic waste, turning them into a valuable resource for nature.

Importantly, these interventions are not viewed as endpoints but as testbeds for broader systemic change. The project will inform future policy at the metropolitan level, including regulations around building codes, biodiversity strategy and climate adaptation. Thus, innovation is embedded in a policy feedback loop: experimental projects inform regulation, which in turn enables scaling.

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Comparative insight to Amsterdam’s RESILIO project

Barcelona is not alone in this shift towards systemic urban resilience. The RESILIO project in Amsterdam (EUI, 2019-2023) offers a complementary example. Focused on blue-green roofs, RESILIO installed 10,000m² of smart, water-retaining rooftops across the city. These roofs are designed to absorb rainwater during storms and release it during dry periods, reducing flood risk and urban heat island effects.

What sets RESILIO apart is not just its technical design but its multi-stakeholder governance. The project is co-managed by public authorities, housing associations, knowledge institutes, and technology providers. Like TOP-SEC, it demonstrates how innovation is organisationally embedded, requiring coordination between diverse actors with different mandates and timelines.

Moreover, both projects engage with social equity, addressing how the benefits of green infrastructure are distributed. In RESILIO’s case, social housing units were prioritised, ensuring that vulnerable groups received the protective benefits of climate-resilient design.

Bridging silos: the core of resilient innovation

The common denominator in these projects is not a particular technology, but an ability to bridge institutional silos. This is the core of resilient innovation, an approach that recognises cities as complex systems, where interventions in one domain (e.g., water management) have ripple effects in others (e.g., housing, health, energy).

In most urban contexts, however, innovation is stymied by fragmentation. Planning, public health, mobility, and climate departments often work in parallel, leading to inefficient and sometimes contradictory outcomes. TOP-SEC and RESILIO show how policy design can overcome these barriers, enabling more integrated responses.

For instance, the AMB used policy instruments like land-use regulation and metropolitan-wide coordination bodies to harmonise local actions. Meanwhile, Amsterdam’s municipality provided technical guidelines and digital tools that allowed building owners to participate in a city-wide monitoring system. In both cases, the role of policy was not just to direct, but to enable, creating a space where innovation could take root and scale.

Scaling through learning and transfer networks

One of the key challenges in urban innovation is scaling that is, how to take localised success and adapt it to other neighbourhoods, cities, or regions. Here, policy plays a pivotal role. The goal is not to replicate exact solutions but to codify learning, support peer-to-peer exchange, and update standards based on real-world experimentation.

TOP-SEC is designed as a learning platform. Its open data protocols, participatory mapping tools, and documentation of rooftop interventions provide valuable resources for other cities. Similarly, RESILIO’s integration into the Amsterdam Rainproof program ensures that its insights are embedded in broader urban climate strategies.

At the European level, initiatives like the European Urban Initiative (EUI) amplify these efforts, funding experimentation, fostering collaboration, and translating local projects into shared knowledge. These frameworks help cities leapfrog common challenges by building on one another’s innovations.

Cities such as Toulouse Metropole, the 9th Borough of Rome, and Petroupoli are not merely testing technical feasibility - examining, for example, what ecological roofs mean in their context, which rooftops are suitable, or how local waste streams might supply biochar. More importantly, they are advancing their socio-organisational readiness. Through policy labs, they explore questions like:

What regulations, codes or standards need updating to integrate ecological roofs into planning?

Who holds jurisdiction over waste streams, and what are the benefits and risks of altering them?

How do we engage private and public building owners in experimentation?

What skills are missing in our ecosystem?

In this sense, innovation is not the result of a single, albeit brilliant, technical solution or  act but sparks from the dynamic interaction between different stakeholders that create a collective, continuous process. And policy, far from being a constraint, becomes its most essential enabler. The transfer lessons generated by TOP-SEC are among its most valuable contributions, paving the way for scale-up and pan-European impact.

More will be reported as the project progresses—so stay tuned. 

Special thanks to Sandra Rainero, transfer expert of TOP SEC, for supporting the development of this article.