Uptaking Nature-based Solutions in Urban Landscapes. Insights from Living Labs in Latin America and Europe.

Living Lab projects have increasingly been seen as instrumental in integrating Nature-based Solutions (NbS) into urban settings. NbS—practices that harness ecosystem services to benefit both nature and people—offer a multifunctional, adaptable, and placespecific approach that can promote transformative change in urban environments. Yet, implementing NbS requires a complex, multi-actor, collaborative, and holistic approach, which often clashes with current urban landscape practices. Given their knowledge creation and transfer capacity, Living Labs have emerged as potential pathways to facilitate NbS uptake in urban landscapes. Although widely supported by research and international organizations, evidence of their impact and effectiveness remains limited, especially in urban landscape and sustainability fields. This research addresses this gap by exploring the capacity of Living Labs to advance NbS adoption within urban landscape governance. It examines both European contexts, where Living Labs and NbS are more established, and Latin American settings, where they are still emerging. Focusing on case studies from Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Turin, part of the H2020 project CONEXUS, the study aims to (i) explore Living Labs’ activities that can foster NbS uptake, (ii) identify short-term outcomes of these projects towards this purpose, and (iii) understand how local actors perceive Living Labs as mechanisms for NbS adoption. Through an in-depth document analysis and qualitative semi structured interviews with participants before and after NbS development, the study highlights the role of Living Labs in integrating NbS into urban landscapes, enabling more collaborative governance, and fostering diverse, local understandings of the concept. It also notes that this project type may not be suitable for all landscape contexts and emphasizes the need for more context-specific approaches. The study concludes by offering key lessons future Living Labs and for more sustainable and multifunctional landscape projects.