Jakarta’s kampungs offer different ingredients of social innovation. Diverse cultural identities and socio-ecological practices of the households and of the community as a whole perform beyond the state and conventional market institutions. They are the seedbeds for alternative solutions to social-ecological problems in cities of the Global South, as the story of the PUSH project tells. However, the social innovation framework necessitates a policy enactment across scales for cultivating the neighbourhood potentialities while accounting for community aspirations, in order to address challenges beyond localities and truly achieve urban socio-spatial inclusion.