The idea of ‘place’ has long been central to the planning and design practice. Recent trends illustrate increased intervention in the ‘experience’ and ‘feeling’ of places, in order to influence and enhance community dynamics. While place-making is an important tool for experts to utilize in community planning, it should be accompanied by a thorough understanding of the contemporary social dynamics of place and the implications it has for the people who inhabit these places. In this sense, participatory planning forms an integral part of future place-making processes and planning thereof. In this paper, the first aim is to capture the importance of incorporating public perspective into the place-making process when considering future urban planning. The second is to stress the importance of the creative participatory processes to attract stakeholders and enhance their willingness to partake in the participatory planning processes. The third aim is to identify creative participatory planning tools that can be used to enhance participatory planning within the place-making process.

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.

This essay addresses the long-term effectiveness of urban climate change adaptation approaches, based, inter alia, on work in the C40 city network. We argue that in most cities, the dominant framing of climate risk management almost exclusively focuses on short-term incrementalities and preventive solutions directly tackling hazards, vulnerability, and exposure. This approach has serious flaws, leading to missed opportunities for longer-term sustainable urban development. Until very recently, climate science usually provided only a marginal input to long-term urban planning and design. We argue that any analysis of urban climate risk management and the associated climate services should be broadened beyond solely climate focusing on impacts. In this context, the development of positive urban visions is a key gap for both research and practice. A change is required from negatively addressing risks to positively pursuing a positive vision of attractive, resilient, and sustainable cities. The emphasis on short-term incremental solutions should shift towards long-term transformation. This embodies a paradigm shift from “function follows system” to “system follows function”. For many cities, this also means a change in procedural practice from siloed top-down to integrated, participatory urban transformation. Our main argument in this paper is that simple, longer-term sustainable urban transformation would not only reduce climate risks but also enhance overall environmental quality, economic opportunities, and social wellbeing.

Climate risk management evolves rapidly from one additional challenge for urban planning into a radical driver of urban development. In addition to fundamental changes in urban planning to increase long-term resilience, the creation of new opportunities for sustainable transformation is imperative. While urban planners increasingly add climate risks to their menu, implementation of effective action is lagging. To reduce urban infrastructure’s vulnerability to heat and flooding, cities often rely on short-term incremental adjustments rather than considering longer-term transformative solutions. The transdisciplinary co-development of inspiring urban visions with local stakeholders over timescales of decades or more, can provide an appealing prospect of the city we desire—a city that is attractive to live and work in, and simultaneously resilient to climate hazards. Taking an historic perspective, we argue that re-imagining historical urban planning concepts, such as the late 19th-century garden city until early 21st century urban greening through nature-based solutions, is a pertinent example of how climate risk management can be combined with a wide-range of socio-economic and environmental goals. Climate knowledge has expanded rapidly over the last decades. However, climate experts mainly focus on the refinement of and access to observations and model results, rather than on translating their knowledge effectively to meet today’s urban planning needs. In this commentary we discuss how the two associated areas (urban planning and climate expertise) should be more fully integrated to address today’s long-term challenges effectively.

Normative scenarios for long-term (e.g., 100 years) landscape development can be very inspiring to imagine outside the box landscape futures, without being obliged to define concrete policy objectives for the shorter term. However, it remains challenging to translate such long-term visions into clear transition pathways. We draw upon a landscape-based design approach to local spatial planning to foster a transition to a well-functioning landscape, resilient to various external pressures. Inspired by a national visioning exercise for the Netherlands in 2120, two local case studies at municipal level in the Netherlands are analysed, aiming to identify in what ways the setup of a regional landscape-based design study using future visions can optimise the spatial planning process. Therefore, this comparative case study analysed the cases on the landscape-based approach, the design process, and the future visions formulated. The comparison shows that fostering abiotic differences safeguards sustainable and resilient landscapes; moreover, co-creation relying on representative local actors appears fundamental for shared solutions, while a landscape-based approach guarantees transitions to adaptive and biodiverse landscapes. We conclude that a shared long-term future landscape vision is a crucial source of inspiration to solve today’s spatial planning problems. The constellation of the stakeholder group involved and the methodological setup of a visioning process are determinative for the way a long-term vision is suited to informing spatial planning for a sustainable future.