From 2019 till 2023 the Municipality of Apeldoorn and Saxion UAS had within the Horizon 2020 CityLoops project the opportunity to experiment in renovating a residential road as circular as possible. Our efforts, experiences and results in changing people, techniques and processes from a social, economic …

The transition towards sustainable and just food systems is ongoing, illustrated by an increasing number of initiatives that try to address unsustainable practices and social injustices. Insights are needed into what a just transition entails in order to critically engage with plural and potentially …

Dairy and other animal products play an important role in the diet of the majority of the population. However, there are a lot of sustainability concerns regarding dairy production due to high environmental impacts. Therefore, there is a need to develop a more sustainable dairy substitute. One of the …

Living Labs need to improve their performance to address urgent social and environmental sustainability challenges. A framework combining the dimensions of environment and focus, methods and collaborative action, and outcomes with a life cycle perspective allowed analysing four Living Labs in the Netherlands …

Community energy can be conceptualized as a social movement, which aims to develop a sustainable, democratic, and localist energy system. Community energy organizations often take the form of cooperatives and strive for a high level of participation at the neighborhood level. Recently, community energy …

In the last two decades, co-creation and social innovation have become important concepts in academic research and public policy. The two concepts are conceptually linked, but this relationship has hardly been problematized in academic literature. In addition, social innovation and especially co-creation …

With increasing activities of multiple sectors in marine spaces, management of marine social–ecological systems requires more holistic approaches. Adopting such an approach, however, presents difficult institutional and disciplinary challenges. Here, we use the International Council for the Exploration …

Community energy can be conceptualized as a social movement, which aims to develop a sustainable, democratic, and localist energy system. Increasingly, community energy initiatives aim to develop citizen-led heating projects. District heating projects are characterized by costly investments, a substantial …

Urban experimentation has been increasingly applied as a tool for finding new ways to face grand societal and environmental challenges⁠. Social learning and reflectivity that urban experiments might trigger are seen as crucial mechanisms in this process⁠. Nevertheless, it often remains unclear how to …

The variety of activities employed by community energy organisations has broadened considerably. Drawing on Social Movement Theory, we argue that these activities indicate that energy communities engage in ‘prefigurative’ activities; they create in their own environment the decentralized and democratic …