People experience the city in different ways. These experiences shape how people view the city and the values they seek to draw from this space. Increasingly, people are experimenting with big data and digital tools within the context of community-based public goods provision as a way to realize values such as sustainability and social justice. In such a way, they claim their right to the city. These experiments can be transformative. There has been a groundswell of scholarship on local efforts to become smarter in support of urban experiments. However, our knowledge of these experiments’ design features remains scant. Design shapes interactions within all collective endeavors. When spatial, institutional, and value-based design principles are weak or missing, urban experiments may fail. This is why this Research Topic’s special focus is on the question of spatial, institutional, and value-based design in urban experiments. Smart urban development seems inevitable for the future of our cities, but who should decide what that future should be like and whose interests smart urbanism serves? Politics is inherent to urban development, and there is increasing evidence that political struggle lies at the heart of urban transformation. From LGBTQ+ activism that claims a right to public space to youth climate protests, political struggle is a call to action. These movements are the flints that spark urban experiments. However, we have scant knowledge of these experiments’ governance, the co-evolution of institutions that guide them, and ways in which they are designed to render value. Research indicates that it is challenging to translate and implement public values in smart city technologies. This Research Topic explores the dynamics between socio-technological processes - particularly, value-based design - that shape urban space and how citizens can participate meaningfully, highlighting how institutional design principles can be leveraged without incurring associated risks. This Research Topic calls for original papers, empirical as well as theoretical, that use the analytical lens of institutional and/or value-based design principles to explore and connect current popular, normative, academic, and political notions on urban commons, such as in the “smart”, “inclusive”, “resilient”, "participatory", "citizen-centric", “sustainable” and “just” cities. The overall goal of this collection of papers is to bring together contributions on the role of institutional and value-based design principles within complex urban systems from different academic disciplines and perspectives. By acknowledging these different perspectives and discussing their cross-cutting themes, we aim to contribute to understanding the complex issues in implementing these technologies posing numerous challenges and trade-offs with which developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management are increasingly faced with. *Keywords*: Institutional design, Value-based design, Participatory city-making, Urban commons, Transformative capacities, Quality of life We welcome your *abstract by Jan 31, 2022* *Relevant information* Website cfp <https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/29142/interrogating-the-design-of-smart-sustainable-and-socially-just-urban-spaces-a-look-at-institutions?utm_source=F-RTM&utm_medium=TED1&utm_campaign=PRD_TED1_T1_RT-TITLE> You can opt for a short piece to a longer article <https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-cities#article-types>! Note: that Frontiers charges publication fees <https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees> which are waived for scientists at institutions with Institutional Memberships. You can find out if your institution is a member by checking here <https://www.frontiersin.org/about/institutional-membership>. Frontiers also has a fee support program. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out! - Shenja van der Graaf, University of Twente - Le Anh Long, University of Twente - Ignazio Vinci, University of Palermo