Schreurs, Jan2023-06-192023-06-192019978-88-99243-93-7https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/311This paper situates epistemological challenges of community-based practices and social innovation research within the perspective of urban transitions. It explores characteristics of innovative, contextualized and generative planning stories. Insights about transformative imaginaries are distilled from an explorative case of reframing urban challenges by thought-images. Planning – as a critical discipline co-creating and supporting explorative paths towards a sustainable future – cares about approaches that can deal with community building for change. This implies an expanded language of planning. Decisive dimensions and characteristics of such a language, and how to build it, can be learned from ‘concept grants’ serving urban policy in Flanders. These grants serve multidisciplinary teams to reframe inchoate situations conceptually, to root those concepts into ongoing and new local processes, and to prepare for implementation. Collective re-framing makes stakeholders ‘see’ the potentials of a unique situation. They can feel how new collaborative coalitions can lead to effective change. They can imagine a different future and the capacities needed to bring it into reach. They incorporate imaging a thought-image while collectively creating, testing, refining and actualizing it.enCo-creationurban policyreframingthought-imageArticle1485-1496