Purpose – Recently, the role of place-based innovation has gained relevance and is being explored by a growing number of scholars. We see this as an opportunity to instantiate a new discourse on bottom-up governance, where the role played by the circulation and management of knowledge is at the same time crucial and displaying unexpected dynamics. Starting from the evidence that places, namely urban places, are more and more showing up as innovation drivers (Hou, 2010), the paper first describes the social streets phenomenon as an example of place-based innovation, then analyses three Italian cases, and finally discusses the relevance of spatial proximity for knowledge sharing and behavioural alignment, thus contributing to the theoretical and pragmatic debate on Urban Living Labs and related innovation processes. Design/methodology/approach – Social streets are informal associations of residents, living in the same street or in close urban proximities (blocks or neighbourhoods), aimed at establishing links, sharing needs, exchanging abilities or knowledge, and collaborating on shared projects, so as to reciprocally benefit from a deeper social interaction and collaboration. This paper explores social streets as innovative examples of place-based innovation. We first investigate the nature of social streets’ innovation, in order to discover the role space has in it. Three specific cases are analysed in detail that differ to one another in having various origins, governance/organizational models and also spatial scales. These three dimensions are used as relevant to describe place-based innovation. Originality/value – The analysis conducted in this paper contributes to the theoretical discussion on Living Labs in general (Følstad, 2008; Ståhlbröst, 2008; Svensson et al., 2010) and Urban Living Labs in particular (Concilio and Molinari, 2014; Concilio et al. 2013), by adding to the analysis of the specific role of urban space in user driven, open innovation environments, where users are no longer passive consumers of services but rather protagonists of real innovation, thanks to their being place dwellers, “owners” and “shapers”. The proposed paper focuses on place-based innovation through the analysis of the social street phenomenon. In discussing alternative governance models of the related socio-digital environments, it suggests deepening the operational perspective of emerging, alternative models of urban government and management.