This panel is organized around the role incidents and crises play in triggering innovation in urban democratic governance. In certain cases, specific events–protests, riots and other forms of violence, bankruptcy--through their disruptive nature can catalyze change, even in path dependent systems. Empirically, our goal is to explore what role disruptive incidents play as critical moments in the development of democratic institutions and practices? What type of disruptions lead to attempts at innovation in democratic governance?  What factors trigger improvisation and mediate the process of development? We define “incidents”, “disruptions” and “crises” loosely as events that make it impossible to go on as before and so demand a break with past practice and the invention a new move in the unfolding sequence of action. We focus on events that resulted in moments in which (groups of) citizens changed practice in a political systems and changed the rules of game or even shifted the way rules are made. When and how are different political actors able to disrupt sequences of action and response, to improvise, and, explicitly or implicitly, change the rules of the game? How do such episodes push stakeholder to rethink their role and basic distinctions like how success and failure are defined? To what extent actually  do these innovations change the existing system and to what extent are they temporary disruptions? Finally, we want to explore the conditions under which these relatively spontaneous or “improvised” forms of renewal in democratic governance were institutionalized and the effects that they have had.