Urban areas account for around 50% of global solid waste generation. In the last decade, the European Union has supported numerous initiatives aiming at reducing waste generation by promoting shifts towards Circular Economy (CE) approaches. Governing this process has become imperative. This article focuses on the results of a governance analysis of six urban regions in Europe involved in the Horizon 2020 project REPAiR. By means of semi-structured interviews, document analysis and workshops with local stakeholders, for each urban area a list of governance challenges which hinder the necessary shift to circularity was drafted. In order to compare the six cases, the various challenges have been categorized using the PESTEL-O method. Results highlight a significant variation in policy contexts and the need for these to evolve by adapting stakeholders’ and policy-makers’ engagement and diffusing knowledge on CE. Common challenges among the six regions include a lack of an integrated guiding framework (both political and legal), limited awareness among citizens, and technological barriers. All these elements call for a multi-faceted governance approach able to embrace the complexity of the process and comprehensively address the various challenges to completing the shift towards circularity in cities.

This article sought to present a process of abrupt transition where technological innovation is concerned. The matter taken up in particular was accelerating digitalisation, in the wider context of digital transformation, and in this case, in reference to spatial planning issues. This article offers an assessment of the level of digitalisation and digital transformation of spatial planning, with this, in turn, making it possible to define the potential at the disposal of rural areas, as they seek to bring in the idea of smart rural development. The empirical analyses present herein are founded upon secondary statistical data as well as our own primary data on the subject of geoportals and their functionality in rural parts of the Łódź region (Poland). The assessments of both planning coverage and geoportal functionality reported herein provide insight regarding the potential for rural areas to implement the concept of GeoDesign, as an integral part of “smart rural development”. The research carried out made it clear that only a fifth of rural gminas in the region are of high potential where GeoDesign is concerned, while every third gmina has only very low potential. A further key conclusion is that rural gminas heading along the path of “smart development” may break out of a spatial order existing thus far on the basis of disparities, and a division of regions into a centre and peripheries. This is of major significance in the context of the diffusion of innovation that digitalisation and digital transformation represent.

This article addresses the problematic county of Wieruszow-a peripheral area of Poland, constituting a classic case of historical development away from urban agglomerations, additionally burdened by the stigma of a former near-border location, and later (including today) functioning at the fringe of an administrative district. The area in question exemplifies structural transformations associated with changes in patterns of accessibility to large urban agglomerations following the coming into operation of a key expressway. The work detailed here has sought to analyse the aforementioned area’s position vis-a-vis accessibility, as set against the background of factors justifying the description of “inner periphery”. An essential element in accounting for any strategy for overcoming this peripherality takes the form of the results of in-depth interviews carried out by the authors. Joint consideration of the two perspectives mentioned, i.e. the structural (showing the position of a given area in relation to its proximate (regional) and ultimate (national) environments), and the social (i.e. the expert assessment), ultimately allowed for an assessment of opportunities and threats as far as the overcoming of peripherality in its geographic and social dimensions is concerned.