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New sustainable neighborhood developments are multiplying worldwide. Embedded in these model neighborhoods are not only particular ideas about better urban form, but also particular ideas about better organization of urban governance and development responsibilities, and how these guide social development and, ultimately, urban life. Numerous frameworks, certifications, and labels have emerged from a range of organizations and actors, intending to offer a level of predictability and certainty in what is included in a sustainable neighborhood, but the majority of these frameworks have yet to be implemented in more than a handful of cases. In this article, we consider two “second generation” ecourban neighborhood frameworks, the Living Community Challenge and EcoDistricts Protocol. We examine these frameworks in terms of seven principles of ecourbanism, and consider the potential of each to guide practice toward an extreme in any particular dimension, or toward an integrated approach. Next, building upon a conceptualization of the demand for intermediary organizations in managing transitions toward urban sustainability, we examine the emergence of these frameworks as they are playing or could play an intermediary or ‘backbone’ role, in building towards collective impact in the realm of ecourbanism. Intermediaries are necessary to advance the practice of transition because none of the key actor groups, while they are necessary and instrumental to bringing particular ecourban neighborhoods into being, are invested with any particular role, responsibility or power to spread the practice of ecourbanism more broadly.

A growing chorus of planners and designers heralds the neighborhood as the best scale at which to pursue a shift toward low-carbon, “green” living alternatives to the status quo Western lifestyle. Within this, attention to ecourban developments, as a set of planning, design, social and technological arrangements for living better within resource limits, has increased; ecourban neighborhood scale developments, as well as the certification frameworks seeking to imbue them with legitimacy, can be found in different countries worldwide. They hold potential lessons for one another across environmental, design and engineering perspectives while also serving as catalysts and demonstration projects of planning, policy and design for sustainability in their local contexts. They offer new opportunities for learning about living well. This is not to say that the rolling out of ecourban neighborhoods in different contexts around the world does not engender tensions. Models, frameworks and practices of ecourbanism may carry divergent interpretations of sustainability and hence advance, to varying degrees, different priorities. These divergences can be seen, for example, across livability, environmental, social and economic priorities. Similar tensions also occur on the issue of scale, with ecourban developments taking form as urban redevelopment megaprojects, technological innovation demonstration projects, smaller-scale alternative lifestyle projects, and other scales in between. This special issue of Articulo - Journal of Urban Research advances the exploration of current trends in ecourban neighborhood-scale developments, including the tensions that they raise. This introduction to the special issue provides a summary of the literature on ecourbanism and the importance of the ‘neighborhood scale’, a synopsis of the Ecourbanism Worldwide project, and provides a brief introduction to the scholarly work included in this special issue.