Over the past two decades, global cities have been addressing climate challenges by transforming their gray infrastructural spaces through climate-adaptive and nature-based regeneration processes. These efforts also aim to tackle local ecological, social, and economic disparities. Despite the prevailing focus on technical and performance-based approaches, research on climate-adaptive, nature-based regeneration of streetscapes remains limited and has yet to significantly influence design-driven approaches to urban regeneration. This paper seeks to address these gaps by emphasizing the importance of spatial dimensions in overcoming current theoretical and operational limitations. It introduces a research experience that aims to leverage the potential of design to promote climate-adaptive, nature-based green regeneration of streetscapes and to integrate this approach into mainstream practices through a “research-by-design” methodology. To achieve this, an operational framework has been developed and is presented here, offering both conceptual and practical insights for creating climate-adaptive, nature-based streetscapes. Following the proposed methodology, two pilot design cases are introduced and discussed, both located in the Italian city of Matera: Piccianello and La Martella. This iterative process aims to establish a framework for sustainable, long-term urban resilience, making cities greener, more adaptive, and more equitable.

The climate crisis exposes the inadequacy of modern urban paradigms grounded in the separation between nature and built form. In response, this paper reframes streetscapes as architectural and urban spaces where ecological performance and spatial composition are conceived as mutually constitutive. Rather than treating Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) as isolated techno-performative devices, the research interprets them as design components capable of shaping section, threshold, and relational depth within the street. Building on two European-funded research projects, the ClimaScapes research—which unfolds into the Climate-Adaptive Nature-Based Urban Regeneration (CANBUR) Framework—through the different phases of Research about Design, Research by Design and Research for Design, thus develops the design-driven Operational Methodology. The paper, repositioning streetscapes as strategic fields for urban and architectural design, presents (i) the tools developed within it and (ii) its application inside a neighborhood of Matera (Italy). The findings demonstrate that integrating NBS within coherent spatial configurations enables a shift from environmental optimization toward architectural composition, offering a transferable yet context-sensitive methodology for climate-adaptive regeneration in Euro-Mediterranean and comparable urban contexts. This approach suggests streetscapes evolve into resilient, climate-adaptive urban commons, reinforcing community ties, ecological sustainability, and the broader goal of future-proof cities.

The transition toward a circular built environment requires more than technological optimisation; it implies a reconfiguration of how value is produced, coordinated and spatialised across material, institutional and territorial systems. Within this context, circularity challenges conventional approaches within built environment education, which often address sustainability as a technical add-on rather than as a structuring principle. Built environment education faces growing pressure to prepare professionals capable of addressing the systemic transformations required for circular transition. This raises a central pedagogical challenge: how can built environment education move beyond technical sustainability modules and instead structure learning around the systemic logics of circularity? Circularity functions as a transversal theme connecting ecological, social, institutional and spatial dimensions through an expanded understanding of value creation and coordination within the built environment. This paper argues that circularity should operate as an organising principle within built environment education rather than as a thematic module or technical design task. The paper presents the pedagogical model implemented within the Circular Cities & Communities (CC&C) programme at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. The programme is structured around three educational lines of Flow, Process and Design, which respectively address material and resource circulation, governance and stakeholder coordination, and spatial interventions. Embedded within urban living labs, the programme connects education with governance processes, infrastructural systems and construction practices. The paper analyses the conceptual foundations of this model and reflects on insights from its first year of implementation, highlighting strengths, challenges and transferable lessons for circular built environment education.

In the context of accelerating climate change and growing socio-environmental inequalities, circularity and climate adaptation are increasingly central to contemporary approaches to urban regeneration, particularly within the pervasive, everyday public infrastructures of streetscapes. Operating across scale, they play a strategic role in regenerative processes, by hosting multiple uses and actors, and offering continuous opportunities to integrate environmental, social, and spatial cycles within the urban fabric. Within this framework, the paper discusses EU-funded research developed by NatureCityLAB (UniBas) resulting in the design-oriented ClimaScapes platform, which addresses climate-adaptive urban regeneration through streetscape transformation. ClimaScapes is conceived as a digital knowledge infrastructure that systematically collects, analyses, and compares exemplary climate-adaptive streetscape projects worldwide, translating diverse practices into shared analytical and operational frameworks. Grounded in design research, the platform structures knowledge between re-search and design, so as to enable a dialogue between different actors. The lessons learnt and the research methodology are then applied to the Italian city of Matera, a medium-sized Mediterranean city, where lessons learnt are critically reinterpreted rather than replicated. This application highlights the role of streetscapes as hybrid socio-spatial systems capable of addressing climatic vulnerability while reinforcing spatial quality and cultural continuity. The paper concludes by framing streetscape regeneration as a circular design process in which climate adaptation, knowledge transfer, and spatial transformation are mutually reinforcing, thus supporting regenerative urban practices that connect research, design, and governance within long-term, resilient urban transitions.