Energy-efficient renovation (EER) is a complex process essential for reducing emissions in the built environment. This research identifies homeowners as the main decision-makers, whereas intermediaries and social interactions between peers are highly influential in home renovations. It investigates information and communication barriers encountered during the initial phases of EERs. The study reviews AI tools developed within the EERs domain to assess their capabilities in overcoming these barriers and identifies areas needing improvement. This research examines stakeholders, barriers, and the AI tools in the literature for EERs. The discussion compares the functionalities of these tools against stakeholder needs and the challenges they face. Findings show that tools often overlook methodologies in human–computer interaction and the potential of textual and visual AI methods. Digital tool development also lacks insights from social science and user feedback, potentially limiting the practical impact of these innovations. This article contributes to the EERs literature by proposing an AI-supported framework and outlining potential research areas for future exploration, particularly improving tool effectiveness and stakeholder engagement to scale up the EER practice.@en

Although gentrification and its associated changes in residential mobility have been widely studied, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the changing origin locations of gentrification-related residential moves. In this study, we use fine-grained register data from the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics to uncover changing residential mobility patterns to and within the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. We identify that the state-led gentrification process goes hand in hand with the changing socioeconomic characteristics of in-movers and the changing origin locations of residential moves. The city of Rotterdam increasingly attracts middle- to high-income households from other core cities in the Netherlands, a process that we understand as inter-urban gentrification spillover. In parallel, intra-urban moves by economically vulnerable residents are declining, especially toward and within gentrifying neighborhoods. This represents evidence of exclusionary displacement. We conclude that the spillover effects of contemporary gentrification should be understood beyond an intra-urban metropolitan perspective since gentrification in one city can enhance gentrification in another.@en

Researchers employ many different approaches to study transitions towards more sustainable futures, of which Sustainability Transitions Research and Social Practice Theory are often used. These approaches offer complementary concepts that are helpful to analyse, explain, forecast, and drive sustainability transitions, e.g. heuristics on changing institutions (Sustainability Transitions Research) or dynamics to change behaviour through practice development (Social Practice Theory). However, despite first attempts, it remains unclear how the approaches can be used together. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to expose crossover frameworks in which these approaches are used together, elaborating on conditions that make this possible, and the strengths and weaknesses of specific crossover frameworks. A systematic literature review has been conducted, investigating the potentials and the limitations for crossovers between Social Practice Theory and Sustainability Transitions Research by analysing the approaches according to the different ontologies and theories and then analysing frameworks that have been created so far. This research elaborates on six crossover frameworks that have been created that all have diverse strengths, such as the ability to conceptualize early transitional changes or finding points of resistance in transitions. All the found crossover frameworks made use of either the multilevel perspective or transition management. Other frameworks of transition research have not been found. This research shows that there has been surprisingly little research to crossover frameworks that incorporate an element of time. The exposition following from this study is interesting for researchers and policymakers working on sustainability transitions and sets an agenda for further framework development.@en

Circular economy (CE) is territorialised. Economic activities are spatially embedded; they operate across a variety of scales and are heavily influenced by their spatial context. Yet the CE academic literature and policy frameworks rarely address this dimension. If CE policies are to achieve sustainable development goals and be implementable at a subnational level, these shortcomings need to be addressed. In this chapter, we take stock of the current debates and policy on CE in cities and urban regions, critiquing them from a spatial, socio-ecological and governance perspective. On that basis, we outline a new policy and research agenda to bridge the above-mentioned gap and inform the development and implementation of place-based CE policies.@en

As circular economy policies are adopted to tackle unsustainable built environment patterns related to carbon emissions and inefficient use of resources, scholars warn about the inadequacy of such policies to support sustainable urban development. Siloed circular economy policies in the built environment have focused on applying circular strategies to construction practices. However, cities as complex adaptive systems require systemic interventions including ecologically regenerative and adaptation actions to bring about a more circular built environment and, ultimately, a circular city. This article analyses policy coherence –or the (mis)alignment and possible synergies– of circular built environment in Greater London. Resorting to a circular city policy coherence framework, through document analysis of planning and circular economy policies and semi-structured interviews, both the state of circular built environment policy is assessed and policy recommendations are provided. Circular built environment policies in Greater London have increased in their overall coherence by means of the application of circular economy principles in construction practices, but less so in bringing about a circular city. The findings contained herein may inform policy making in Greater London and other cities of the world to help improve their circular city policy responses to the complex societal challenges imposed by the ongoing socio-ecological crisis.@en

The urgency of addressing housing challenges in low-income areas is increasing due to widening socio-economic inequalities and the worsening impact of natural disasters. Saint Martin, a small Caribbean island, is struggling to provide affordable housing amidst hurricanes, floods, and heat waves. As a result, there has been a rise in self-organized housing units, which are built incrementally and are susceptible to risks. The main challenge is to balance durability, functionality, and esthetic appeal over time. Inspired by St. Martin’s self-organized units, this article explores housing considerations in low-income, hazard-prone contexts by emphasizing their temporalities. Integrating insights from a formative study, including a literature review and ethnographic research, the paper draws on Stewart Brand’s “Layers of Change” and the concept of “Flow”. The study identifies layers within self-organized units corresponding to durability, functionality, and esthetic appeal. It delves into their connection with building activities over time, unveiling the temporalities of housing considerations. This exploration leads to the proposition of “Designing for a Flow” as a novel design approach. Offering practical insights within a concise framework, the study provides nuanced perspectives on mitigating housing challenges in low-income and hazard-prone contexts.@en

While tackling sustainability challenges, engineering students confront various uncertainties, including the unpredictability of real-world scenarios, unfamiliar aspects of problems, and conflicting viewpoints among stakeholders. Despite previous research indicating the likelihood of encountering such uncertainties in sustainability projects, it is unclear if students are aware of uncertainty and what specific regulatory behaviors they develop to address them. This study seeks to deepen our understanding of the awareness and regulation of uncertainty by students while they work on real-life sustainability challenges. To achieve this, we observed nine MSc students enrolled in a transdisciplinary course on urban sustainability at a Dutch university of technology. Through interviews, we explored the uncertainties they faced and how they navigated them. Our analysis, conducted through open, consensus-based coding by two researchers, revealed that students primarily encountered the uncertainty of multiplicity, characterized by divergent stakeholder perspectives. Additionally, students increasingly recognized the inherent unpredictability of the challenges over the course. To address uncertainty, students developed three kinds of behaviors to deal with uncertainty: seeking social support from commissioners, coaches, and peers; employing small coping mechanisms to overcome obstacles; and developing attitudes such as empathy, flexibility, and relativism. This study offers detailed insights into how students navigate uncertainty. Moving forward, efforts in uncertainty education should prioritize how educators can positively influence the development of metacognition in uncertainty.@en

Increasing resilience to flooding is a complex process that requires horizontal and vertical coordination between institutions in policy making and implementation. This paper explores the effect of institutional coordination on managing flood risk in two cities plagued by flooding. Our results show that efforts on building urban flood resilience can be undermined by lack of proper coordination between urban development, water management and land use planning. We find that this complexity is magnified by the emergence of the concept of resilience as an urban development goal that is increasingly pursued by various authorities, but that is inherently contested in practice.@en

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector is in need of a transition towards a circular economy. This article offers an analysis of two cases with a wide variation regarding project dynamics in the Netherlands. Alignments and misalignments were analyzed between practices concerning seven design strategies for circular design based on social practice theory and concepts from the multi-level perspective. Results show that many misalignments still hinder the transition, mostly concerning the use of secondary resources, such as notions regarding quality, beauty, and safety among project team members or rapid decision-making processes of the municipality that misalign with the uptake of design with secondary resources. This article offers directions for reconfiguration, such as better tuning between project planning and urban planning and taking up a more flexible stance regarding the function of the building. This research is interesting for practitioners and researchers focusing on the transition towards a circular economy in the AEC sector.@en

This closing chapter brings together the main messages from each chapter. It formulates a policy agenda for circular cities and regions. It does so by providing a set of recommendations for policy practice. These are addressed at authorities and policy stakeholders at the international, national and subnational levels.@en

Klimaatverandering zorgt tal van nieuwe risico’s voor gebouwen en infrastructuur. Het in kaart brengen van deze klimaatrisico’s is in volle gang, maar de betrouwbaarheid van de beoordelingen die hieruit volgen laat te wensen over en dit maakt de handelingsbasis beperkt. Dat concludeerden de experts die deelnamen aan de eerste Focal Point Meeting van het Red&Blue-programma over klimaatadaptatie. @en

This paper focuses on the information and communication challenges in the Dutch energy transition in the built environment, with a specific focus on energy-efficient retrofits (EER) in homeowners’ associations (HOAs). The research surveyed the literature on barriers and drivers related to information and communication in EERs. It systematically investigated the information sources and communication channels provided by governmental and non-governmental institutions on financial subsidies, step-by-step guidelines, home evaluation tools, and participation guidelines. Lastly, the research categorised and evaluated the interfaces designed to deliver the information to the Dutch homeowners’ associations. The research also explored the barriers and drivers related to trust issues in EERs as the correlation between trust and information and communication emerged as one of the most prominent factors affecting EERs' acceptance. The paper analysed the online information sources based on readability, credibility, and interactivity, focusing on accessibility and the ability to generate tailor-made suggestions. The analysis revealed that the online information sources are disorganised and dispersed. The online platforms rarely provide information on prior case studies and more on financial subsidies, guidelines, and EER benefits. Lastly, we discussed the main barriers and potential solutions for these challenges.@en

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have been implemented in many cities, but their organizational and legal structure has not often been analyzed. ULLs aim to provide a space for different parties to research, develop, and test solutions to urban problems whilst engaging with local communities. Their experimental approach to urban innovation and to public-private collaboration makes flexibility, openness, and informality important. However, ULLs are also confronted with existing legal frameworks, responsibilities, and liabilities. Whilst they aim at shared decision-making and horizontality, they must navigate public and private interests, and interact with local government as well. To understand these dynamics, this article examines the legal and organizational structures of ULLs, the factors and trade-offs that influence it, and the role municipal government plays in in these structures. This article analyzes the different forms and trajectories of ULLs in practice, through semi-structured interviews held in four labs in Amsterdam. Through qualitative research, we found that 1) ULLs are partnerships that exist on a spectrum of formalization, from informal to highly formal; 2) the degree of formalization is influenced by financial, legal, and organizational factors that change over time; 3) each degree of formalization is associated to trade-offs, even if these trade-offs are not explicitly formulated by the people involved; 4) tensions arise from the municipality's double role as public authority and as partner. We conclude that ULLs could gain from clearly identifying the legal frameworks that condition their structure, actions, and future.

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Universities open their doors to society, inviting the complexity of the world to enter engineering education through challenge-based courses. While working on complex issues, engineering students learn to deal with different kinds of uncertainty: uncertainty about the dynamics of a real-world challenge, the knowledge gaps in the problem, or the conflicting perspectives amongst the people involved. Although we know from previous research that students are likely to encounter these uncertainties in sustainability challenges, which metacognitive strategies they use to deal with them is unclear. We interviewed nine MSc students at the end of a challenge-based course at a Dutch university of technology. We asked the students how they dealt with uncertainty in collaboration with the commissioner, their student team, and the teachers. The interviews were analyzed through grounded, consensus-based coding by two researchers. Preliminary results show students use three main strategies. First, the different perspectives from peers in their team inform the position of the student. Second, students find expectation management of the commissioner essential, yet students struggle with how to do this in a professional and timely way. Third, students frame the uncertainties they encounter as part of the learning process, which allows them to accept the possibility of failure. This study provides first insights in metacognitive uncertainty strategies and suggests those strategies should become a more prominent topic in coaching students. When uncertainty becomes an explicit part of challenge-based education, students learn to deal with both the known and unknown in the transition to a sustainable society.

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Purpose
In collaboration with their home cities, universities increasingly develop courses in which students investigate urban sustainability challenges. This paper aims to understand how far-reaching the collaboration with urban stakeholders in these courses is and what students are meant to learn from the transdisciplinary pedagogies.

Design/methodology/approach
This research is designed as a qualitative multiple-case study into the intentions of transdisciplinary courses in which universities collaborate with their home cities: Delft University of Technology in Delft and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions in Amsterdam. The study compares the written intentions of eight courses in course descriptions with the ideal intentions that teachers describe in interviews.

Findings
First, seven of the eight investigated courses were designed for urban stakeholders to participate at a distance or as a client but rarely was a course intended to lead to a collaborative partnership between the city and students. Second, the metacognitive learning objectives, such as learning to deal with biases and values of others or getting to know one’s strengths and weaknesses in collaboration, were often absent in the course descriptions. Learning objectives relating to metacognition are at the heart of transdisciplinary work, yet when they remain implicit in the learning objectives, they are difficult to teach.

Originality/value
This paper presents insight into the levels of participation intended in transdisciplinary courses. Furthermore, it shows the (mis)alignment between intended learning objectives in course descriptions and teachers’ ideals. Understanding both the current state of transdisciplinarity in sustainability courses and what teachers envision is vital for the next steps in the development of transdisciplinary education.
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The delivery of urban basic infrastructure services is often guided by the modern infrastructure ideal, which aims for technical innovation, economic efficiency and uniformity through long-term, centralized management approaches. In rapidly growing urban centres of the global South, however, heterogeneous infrastructure configurations have long involved multiple systems in varying degrees of coexistence. This paper explores how community-based enterprises – organizations that aim not to turn a profit but rather to generate human well-being – contribute to, complement or conflict with wider municipal solid waste management strategies. It does so through two case studies, focused on Luchacos, a local enterprise turning waste into briquettes in an informal settlement of Kampala, Uganda; and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a cooperative of waste pickers in Ahmedabad, India. Drawing on empirical data and policy analysis, the research finds that, given the necessary state support, community-based enterprises can contribute to a range of sustainability and development objectives.

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With rapid high-speed railway (HSR) developments in China, HSR-based transit-oriented development (TOD) has proliferated across the country. Although local governments claim that HSR station areas are planned according to TOD principles, some scholars argue that these station areas actually contribute to unsustainable development. This study investigates two main questions: (1) what success factors should be included in a TOD plan for HSR station areas? (2) to what extent are these factors considered in the plans of Chinese HSR station areas? To answer these questions, we use content analysis to compare spatial plans for 15 HSR station areas across China, triangulating the findings via in-depth interviews and field investigations. This study reveals that most of the factors in the plans for HSR station areas deviate from TOD principles, especially in small- and medium-sized cities. We find that Chinese local governments mainly use TODs as a tool to promote suburban expansion around HSR stations.@en

Comprehensive understanding of the merits of bottom-up urban development is lacking, thus hampering and complicating associated collaborative processes. Therefore, and given the assumed relevancies, we mapped the social, environmental and economic values generated by bottom-up developments in two Dutch urban areas, using theory-based evaluation principles. These evaluations raised insights into the values, beneficiaries and path dependencies between successive values, confirming the assumed effect of placemaking accelerating further spatial developments. It also revealed broader impacts of bottom-up endeavors, such as influences on local policies and innovations in urban development.@en

Zware industriële bedrijvigheid ligt in Nederland meer dan ooit onder een vergrootglas. De milieu-impact van deze industrie op de omgeving is - onder meer door de uitstoot van verontreinigende stoffen die vrijkomen bij de productieprocessen - vaak groot. Op verschillende plekken is er grote bezorgdheid over de gezondheidsrisico’s voor omwonenden vanwege deze uitstoot (denk aan de grafietregens bij Tata Steel, PFAS bij o.a. Chemours).2 Toenemende kennis bij omwonenden en belangenorganisaties en een verminderde maatschappelijke tolerantie leidt tot een veranderend maatschappelijk normbesef ten aanzien van deze activiteiten. […] @en