This paper discusses current efforts of the city of Seoul to grapple with some of its most pressing sustainability problems through conjoint social and governance innovations. Drawing on pertinent strands of urban-, transition-, and resilience-studies, it reviews the design and implementation of activities aimed at establishing a self-organizing social innovation ecosystem nurtured by place-based networks at neighborhood scale ("village communities"), and reflects on their potential to

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... ly enable wider sustainability transition dynamics. Proceedings of the 8th Conf. Int. Forum Urban. C001 is for transformative approaches that may enable, trigger, accelerate and scale-up radical sustainability innovations within and across multiple areas of life [3, 4] . Research that has engaged with transition dynamics in relation to the local scale has so far emphasized three basic levers of change (see section 2): 1) Policy-driven (multi-level) governance shifts, 2) community-driven grassroots innovations, and 3) broader capacity-building processes supported by diverse stakeholders. All of these levers rely on particular forms of agency and social interaction, and may imply a significant potential for synergy in case of their interconnection [5, 6] . Their coincidence under conditions of place thus raises crucial issues of interest for urban sustainability transitions, but is not well understood to date. Especially the direct encounter between purposive forms of innovation in urban governance, capacity building and community practice forms a blind spot here: What are the shared objectives and strategies pursued, how does a coordination occur, and what conditions their success or failure? This is not only a matter of conflicting interests and power positions, ranging from urban (growth) regimes to grassroots movements. It also asks for differences and similarities regarding the socio-technical systems (STS) and social-ecological systems (SES) addressed by them. Moreover, there is a constitutive but often disregarded role for urban place and the built environment in this, i.e. not only selected STS or SES components: How does the spatial coincidence of diverse networks and flows and their articulation in concrete urban places affect the innovation needs, priorities and resistances in a particular city? This coincidence may represent both an opportunity, but also a barrier for simultaneously dealing with multiple system transformations [7] . Starting from these considerations, this paper will therefore discuss ongoing social and governance innovations in Seoul, the South Korean capital. The case provides for a pertinent example of novel strategies and approaches that aim to leverage 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' innovation dynamics in a given urban context. It is also of high interest with a view to the sustainability impacts of urban development in both developed and developing Asia [8] . Section 2 lays out the conceptual and analytical framework for the case study, and details the methods used. Section 3 synthesizes the relevant conditions and changes observed in Seoul, which are then reviewed in section 4 in the light of the analysis criteria adopted. Finally, some more general conclusions regarding urban transition research and policy are drawn in section 5.