Joint workshop by the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Partnership, GINNGER and REGEN projects
📅 2 December 2026 · 16:00–17:30 CET
📍 Sustainable Places 2026 – Luxemburg,
🔗 Registration to Sustainable Places is mandatory
Urban transitions depend on meaningful collaboration between public authorities, businesses, research organisations and civil society. Co-creation and living lab approaches help these actors jointly define challenges, test solutions and build shared ownership. Applying them effectively in practice, however, is still difficult.
The interactive workshop “Co-creating urban transitions: building living labs for stakeholder engagement”, in the context of Sustainable Places 2026, will support practitioners tackle this challenge. Organised by the DUT Partnership, GINNGER and REGEN EU projects, the event will introduce three complementary co-creation approaches to stakeholder engagement. It shows how each can support the design and implementation of collaborative urban transition processes.
Living labs and co-creation in practice
The session will open with short presentations by the three programmes. Each will explain its co-creation or living lab approach and illustrate it with one or two project examples, showing different ways to involve stakeholders, structure collaboration and move from a shared challenge towards action.
Participants will then put the approaches to work at three tables, one per programme. Starting from a fictitious scenario, each group will build its own living lab or neighbourhood regeneration process by working through key choices:
- defining the shared challenge and intended outcomes
- identifying and positioning relevant stakeholders
- selecting suitable co-creation activities and ways of working
- creating ownership and continuity beyond the initial process
The table work will produce three living lab and co-creation concepts. A closing plenary will compare them and invite participants to reflect on which elements could be useful in their own projects and contexts.
Agenda
- Introduction: shared objective and workshop set-up
- Presentations by DUT, GINNGER and REGEN
- The scenario, table approaches and assignment
- Parallel table work: building a Living Lab
- Plenary comparison, wrap-up and key reflections
Speakers
- Nina Moussé, Project Manager, Parisian Climate Agency (GINNGER project)
- Gilles Evrard Essuman, PhD, LISER (REGEN project)
- Jonas Guigonnat, Project Manager Sustainability and Climate, Platform31 (DUT partnership)
- Marc Dijk, Academic Researcher and Lecturer, Maastricht University (DUT partnership)
Who is the event for
- Local and regional authorities taking part in, or collaborating with, EU projects
- Industry stakeholders in sustainable urban development, such as construction, energy and technology providers
- Consultancies and network organisations supporting implementation and knowledge exchange
Why join
Participants will gain first-hand experience of three co-creation and living lab approaches. They will also take away practical insights into structuring stakeholder engagement in your own urban transition projects. The workshop contributes to the Sustainable Places themes Decarbonisation & Circularity and Energy communities, smart cities & urban transition.
Learn more about Sustainable Places 2026
Cover photo by FORTYTWO on Unsplash
