Living labs are understood as collaborative platforms in which actors from research, government and business, and citizens, work together to address complex societal challenges. They are increasingly seen as an instrument to support sustainability transitions, such as transitions to a circular bio-based climate smart society. Living labs can create spaces for joint experimenting and learning by exploring the barriers and possibilities for transition and co-creating appropriate and viable solutions. These high expectations for and increased interest in living labs has sparked a keen interest in methods for assessing the performance of living labs. However, there is not yet an evaluation method or framework that is generally accepted and used. The few existing methods and frameworks mostly focus on the functioning of the living lab itself, and not on its wider impacts. Building on existing approaches and informed by the experiences in three living labs, we developed an assessment framework that enables the capturing of the dynamic role and contribution of living labs. This paper describes the framework and how it was developed. The paper contributes to the development of appropriate ways of assessing the functioning of living labs and the ways in which they contribute to sustainability transitions.

In a context of a rapidly changing livability of towns and countryside, climate change and biodiversity decrease, this paper introduces a landscape-based planning approach to regional spatial policy challenges allowing a regime shift towards a future land system resilient to external pressures. The concept of nature-based solutions and transition theory are combined in this approach, in which co-created normative future visions serve as boundary concepts. Rather than as an object in itself, the landscape is considered as a comprehensive principle, to which all spatial processes are inherently related. We illustrate this approach with three projects in the Netherlands in which landscape-based visions were used to guide the land transition, going beyond the traditional nature-based solutions. The projects studied show that a shared long-term future landscape vision is a powerful boundary concept and a crucial source of inspiration for a coherent design approach to solve today’s spatial planning problems. Further, they show that cherishing abiotic differences in the landscape enhances sustainable and resilient landscapes, that co-creation in the social network is a prerequisite for shared solutions, and that a landscape-based approach enhances future-proof land-use transitions to adaptive, circular, and biodiverse landscapes.