Neighbourhoods are essential spaces for communities to thrive. Yet despite decades of research and policy attention, urban development has consistently fallen short of delivering socially and environmentally sustainable neighbourhoods capable of meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century (Grillitsch, Coenen & Morgan, 2023; Pagh & Cook, 2023). Instead, neighbourhoods have been shaped through fragmented approaches, driven by competing assumptions about what they are, who they are for, and what they should do (Allen, 2018; Hemmersam, 2023; Talen, 2017). This has left the production of the built environment in the hands of capital interests, outdated planning systems, and chance – fuelling chronic underinvestment, spatial degradation, and the systematic hollowing out of urban spaces (Gómez-Mont, 2021; Mattern, 2019; Neighbourhoods Commission, 2025).

Against this backdrop, a “third generation” of innovation policy has emerged. Mission-oriented (Mazzucato, 2018), challenge-driven (Coenen et al., 2015), and transformative innovation (Diercks et al., 2019) policy approaches have reframed societal challenges as drivers of systemic transformation, catalysing a wave of trans-local initiatives that experiment with bureaucracy, rethink citizen engagement, and create new forms of public good (Kattel et al., 2025; Uyarra et al., 2025; Wanzenböck & Frenken, 2022). Within this agenda, mission neighbourhoods are proposed as the scale at which technological, social, and ecological change converge – leveraging physical and social infrastructures, governance, and everyday life as levers of transformation (Pagh & Cook, 2023).

Realising this potential, however, depends on institutional capabilities that public organisations typically lack. Supranational and national innovation policy remains “spatially blind,” overlooking the intricate mix of social and physical relations that define neighbourhoods. A “missing middle” in innovation infrastructure paralyses coordination across levels of public and private institutions, while the absence of generative institutions limits sustained collaboration (Bellinson, 2020; Fastenrath et al., 2023; Kattel, 2022; Mazzucato, 2024; Sørensen & Torfing, 2022; Uyarra et al., 2025). Scholars therefore highlight the role of transition intermediaries—systemic, niche, and process actors—in bridging these deficits by anchoring missions in place, mobilising legitimacy, and facilitating experimentation (Kivimaa et al., 2019; Sovacool et al., 2020; Von Wirth et al., 2019).

Surprisingly, relatively little is known about the practices through which intermediaries design, adapt, and negotiate urban missions at neighbourhood scale (Beer, 2023; Ehnert et al., 2023; Flanagan, Uyarra & Wanzenböck, 2022; Mukhtar-Landgren et al., 2019; Pagh & Cook, 2023; Rossi et al., 2021; Von Wirth et al., 2019). Scholarship has typically framed intermediaries in abstract roles, functions, and capabilities, while empirical accounts of practice remain fragmented, contextual, and undertheorised (Ehnert et al., 2023; Fauth, De Moortel & Schuurman, 2024; Fastenrath et al., 2023). This represents a significant knowledge gap: without a grounded understanding of everyday routines and behaviours, mission approaches risk failing to become operationalised, institutionalised, and diffused—or even reinforcing the very challenges they seek to address (Kanda, Magnusson & Hjelm, 2024; Kattel & Mazzucato, 2025).

This study therefore asks: What are the practices of systemic, niche, and process intermediaries in designing, adapting, and negotiating urban missions at the neighbourhood scale?

To answer this question, the study uses a grounded theory methodology, drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews: four with stakeholders from mission-oriented neighbourhood initiatives in the UK, Belgium, Canada, and Australia, and 11 with wider expert practitioners, supplemented by document analysis. This approach generated comparative empirical material, analysed inductively to develop theory from the ground up. As mission initiatives remain emergent, this study is explorative – providing a snapshot of practices and their tensions.

The findings identify four dimensions of urban mission practice articulated through nine interrelated routines: (1) Dynamic stewardship, orchestrating the “messy middle” through strategic agility, shifting altitudes, and relational trust; (2) Shaping, configuring infrastructures through participatory scaffolding and street-level prototyping; (3) Sensemaking, curating and translating evidence into insights; and (4) Framing, building vocabularies and narratives that mobilise collective purpose. Together, these practices reveal how systemic ambitions are translated into everyday routines, grounding mission-oriented innovation in the socio-spatial realities of neighbourhoods.

Building on this grounded theory model, the study develops an emerging typology of urban mission practices that interprets both their generative capacities and their tensions. In turn, this typology provides a framework for linking practice-based insights to broader accounts of dynamic capabilities and public sector innovation, showing how intermediary practices both compensate for and remain constrained by capability deficits. Without institutional reform to address these deficits, however, mission neighbourhoods risk becoming symbolic experiments – celebrated in discourse but unable to reshape the systems they inhabit.

This study is structured as follows: section 2 develops the theoretical background, defining neighbourhoods, situating missions as third-generation innovation policy, and highlighting capability deficits and intermediary roles; section 3 outlines the grounded theory methodology, including data sampling, collection, and analysis; section 4 presents the findings, introducing the four practice dimensions before framing them within case vignettes; section 5 develops the discussion, advancing an emerging typology of urban mission practice and interrogating the epistemic and normative tensions of mission neighbourhoods; and section 6 concludes with contributions, limitations, and directions for future research.