CBL and living labs: towards a methodology for teaching sustainability transitions in urban planning education

ABSTRACT

This article looks at a challenge-based learning (CBL) approach that aims to engage students in sustainable transitions within urban and regional planning. Drawing on CBL, we focus on how living labs – the idea of using a city as a site for user-driven innovation and development – can be used as a site and methodology in education and research on planning for sustainability. The paper presents insight from teaching planning master’s students and a living lab initiative in Linköping, Sweden. We aim to contribute to research on how to teach sustainable transitions within urban and regional planning by focusing on CBL and propose a methodology using a challenge-driven living lab aimed at supporting sustainable transformation learning. We mean that educational engagement with living lab approaches can be both a study tool and potentially an arena for change. Our experiences from teaching a living lab exercise illustrate the value of working with challenge based-learning approaches and “real-life” challenges, the added value from projects consisting of various actors including external groups, and the need for constructive peer-based and student-led learning. We suggest that a challenge-driven living lab methodology can be useful in teaching sustainable transformation in Geography and Planning and have wider implications.

KEYWORDS:

• CBL
• living labs
• urban and regional planning
• sustainability transition
• higher education

Introduction

A key challenge for higher education in geography is how we can help students actively contribute to sustainable transitions in urban and regional planning. In this article, we suggest that challenge-based learning (CBL) can be an important tool in the ambition to shift from analysing and understanding problems towards finding solutions for environmental and societal change (for further discussion see Hölscher et al., 2018). We outline how we have used a challenge-based learning approach based around a living labs approach: an approach in which city or territorially based experimental spaces are used to foster knowledge co-creation in both research and practice. Our aim is to contribute to research on how to teach sustainable transitions within urban and regional planning by focusing on CBL and propose a methodology using a challenge-driven living lab aimed at supporting sustainable transformation learning.

In parallel to being teachers in urban and regional planning and human geography, we were involved in a research project on sustainable transformation and living labs and this paper emerged out of curiosity for developing a methodology that could be used both in research and in education. Higher education has a role and a responsibility to lead research and teach about sustainability issues (Dentoni & Bitzer, 2015) but we have faced challenges in providing appropriate learning environments for sustainable development (Cortese, 2003; Cross & Congreve, 2021; Ferrer-Balas et al., 2010; Lozano, 2006; Maruna et al., 2018). For geography and planning, the complexity of future oriented spatial problems suggests a need to develop skills and knowledge on how to handle sustainability (Gregory & Lewin, 2020; Simm et al., 2021) and on how this can be done collaboratively (Innes & Booher, 2016). Against this background, the question of how we can better equip students to play a key role in initiating, guiding, and coordinating sustainable transitions became central to a course we developed and ran as well as it is central to this article which is based on that course.

The article is based on an empirical project on a CBL course we designed for urban and regional planning master’s students at Linköping University in Sweden. In the next section, we treat in greater detail the CBL approach and the idea of living-labs. Following this, we present the project methodology. The project results are then presented chronologically through a series of three learning stages, which we suggest might serve as a conceptual framework for organising CBL-based courses that use real-life cases (here a living lab approach). The article finishes with a concluding discussion.

Challenge-based learning

In approaching challenge – based learning (CBL), we draw on Dewey (1938) and Schön’s (1992) notion of experimental learning and how education should contribute to problem-solving in society. CBL aligns with higher education’s goals and strategies to improve students’ employability through student-led approaches, sustainability, and collaborations with stakeholders (Gallagher & Savage, 2023). At least in Sweden, CBL is not well known in urban and regional planning programs, but we believe it is well suited to such programs since it clearly focuses on solution-oriented work as well as it integrates sustainability issues (Enelund et al., 2013). Most previous studies have used CBL approaches in engineering education (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020; Malmqvist et al., 2015; Salinas-Navarro & Garay-Rondero, 2020; van den Beemt et al., 2023), and there are a few others in the field such as law, medicine, marketing, and fashion design (ex. Colombelli et al., 2022; Eraña-Rojas et al., 2019; Ma, 2023; Pérez-Sánchez et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2018). Problem-based learning (PBL) is a precursor to CBL. The commonalities between them are that they use a problem or a challenge as a starting point. The main differences are that in PBL students work in teams with a specific problem and learning takes place during the process of finding a solution. In CBL, the problem is expanded to include additional characteristics, such as problem identification and formulation, dialogues with stakeholders, and consideration of societal contexts and impacts. In addition, CBL also aims to foster the ability of teamwork and personal awareness (Gallagher & Savage, 2023; Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020; Malmqvist et al., 2015).

Conceptualizing CBL can be problematic since it is often understood as an intervention or teaching method defined by practices and activities used by the teachers to enable student learning rather than by conceptual underpinnings (Leijon et al., 2022; van den Beemt et al., 2023). CBL as an educational concept places emphasis on interpretation and valuation (deciding what is “worth” learning) and rests on a belief that knowledge is created collaboratively rather than simply learned. These assumptions led CBL to specific educational practices that are organized in a specific way: learning starts with the identification of real-life problems, and rests upon a hybrid of collaboration and support.

The CBL methodology emphasises the idea that facing real-life problems or challenges triggers learning. It can be considered a student-centred learning technique, where students develop competencies and skills to solve future-oriented problems. CBL should be seen as a pedagogical approach that engages students in a real-world setting, where students should define a challenge and come up with a possible solution. All of this is rooted in an assumption that engagement with others in relation to a real-life issue motivates learning through a feeling of meaningfulness (Larsson & Holmberg, 2018). The goal is to learn to define and address a subjectively worthwhile or meaningful problem and to learn what is needed to reach a solution, not to necessarily “solve” the problem itself. The challenge should be future oriented as the “challenges” that are the best drivers for learning are suggested to be those that address real societal needs (Malmqvist et al., 2015).

CBL encourages students to acquire and apply knowledge and skills that are needed to work with their challenge. The first component of these is an emphasis on collaborative learning and the skills needed for collaboration. Collaboration is identified in CBL as a key competence and means students need to acquire (Gallagher & Savage, 2023). In particular, intensive group work is suggested to be key to learning cooperation and collaboration (Kayes et al., 2005). Collaboration and co-learning are commonly used and understood tools in many pedagogical approaches, but what is perhaps different here is that the focus is as much on collaborative skills development as it is the results of collaboration. Thus, the approach stresses the need to focus on the ability to communicate, cooperate, collaborate, and compromise with others; and the need to develop personal awareness of “values” and ethics in decision-making (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020, p. 23). Other studies have shown that CBL allows students to develop critical thinking capabilities and even management thinking (Olivares Olivares et al., 2018; Pérez-Sánchez et al., 2020) and that such skills are sought after by employers (Chapman et al., 2006; Liden et al., 2004).

Whilst CBL is inherently based upon student-driven learning, support, supervision, and feedback are essential components (van den Beemt et al., 2023). CBL involves support from both teachers, stakeholders, and other students. Whilst little attention has been paid in the literature on what the teacher actually does in CBL (Gallagher & Savage, 2023; Leijon et al., 2022) we suggest below that teachers are far from neutral facilitators for a student-driven process, but rather they are central to creating appropriate learning spaces and for training in the skills needed for collaboration. If teachers have often been out of view in CBL approaches, the role and involvement of stakeholders is a highly lauded and distinctive dimension of CBL (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020) and stakeholders’ participation and feedback has been suggested to help students find the most relevant solution (Malmqvist et al., 2015).

Living labs

The CBL literature places a heavy emphasis on real-world actors and stakeholders of different types. However, the focus tends to be on actors rather than the “world” or spaces within which actors exist. What is often missing from CBL approaches is a tangible set of spaces in which challenges can be formed and approached. For geographers and planners, we argue that a more spatially defined focus for the learning process is crucial.

When trying to design a course built upon CBL, we arrived at the idea of integrating the living labs notion. The living lab idea is to use a real urban or regional environment as a user-centered open innovation co-creation, testing, or learning ecosystem. The living labs idea has been often tied to ideas of sustainability and has become a form of sustainability experimentation across Europe (Evans & Karvonen, 2014; Voytenko et al., 2016) with an explicit focus on urban and regional sites and their purpose is to initiate activities that may become future initiatives to address sustainability problems (Bulkeley et al., 2016). They have been suggested to potentially improve urban sustainability (Laborgne et al., 2021) and generate broader system change for achieving sustainability (Bulkeley et al., 2018). The aim of including a living lab setting was for the student groups to work together with local external actors to work with a challenge-driven and user-centric sustainability problem based in a local context. What is rather unique to living lab as a model for change and innovation is that it is the users that are viewed to have the agency to shape change and innovation in their everyday lives and environments. This differs from traditional innovation networks or labs where the users are observed, and their insights are captured and interpreted by experts (Lee et al., 2012). The users not only act as sources of information but they are also testers, developers, and designers of innovation on an equal basis with the others in the living lab (Nyström et al., 2014). A living lab in education may foster active student learning but also potentially promote collaborations and create socio-technical solutions for strategic challenges (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020). Hence, students engaged in deliberate and empowering processes tackling “real-world” challenges can build sustainability competencies (Barth et al., 2007; Wiek et al., 2011).

The explicit geographic setting, combined with the idea of sustainability innovation occurring through collaborative and user-centric ecosystems, made the combination of a Living Labs setting and a CBL approach a promising approach for a foundational course in urban and regional planning. The course that resulted from this combination is the focus of the rest of this article.

Methodology

The methodology was a mixed method qualitative study. Our empirical focus was two 10-week-long master’s level courses (“Strategic Urban and Regional Planning” 15 högskolepoäng/ECTS) held 1 year apart in 2020 and 2021 as part of the master’s program in Strategic Urban and Regional Planning at Linköping university. It is a first-year course on the master’s program and the students belong to an international group of around 30–40 students each year (40 in 2020, 33 in 2021). The students come from different disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from geography and planning, environmental science, business studies, global studies, public administration, to international relations. The course is conducted in English, but for most, English was a second language. We used data collected during the courses held in 2020 and 2021, and though some small changes to the course were made both years, the content and student intake remained comparable.

Two main types of primary data were collected: data from students, and participant observation based on our roles as staff running and working on the courses. Secondary materials that we draw on include general documentation from the course, course plans, study guides, group works, posters, and reports. Direct student evaluations and feedback were one source of data. Feedback from the students involved in the project was mainly derived from university feedback and course reviews. The students’ free-text, anonymous comments in the module’s standard university Evaluation Report (Evaluate) were used: results from 2020 had a 90% response rate and 2021 had a 72% response rate. During the final week of the courses one-hour oral course dialogue sessions took place between the students taking the course and the teacher. During the dialogue, students had the opportunity to discuss the course structure, course content, and how the course was carried out. Apart from anonymous evaluation surveys, all students submitted obligatory written critical reflections on their project experiences. In their final week, the students submitted further individual reflection papers, where they reflect on their learning by responding to the following questions: “what has affected you, what stands out in your mind, how what is the most memorable parts of the exercise, are there any unanswered questions or critical issues that you would like to address, how has the exercise related to what you have read before?”

As teachers, we were engaged in all the student seminars, supervisions, presentations, and field trips. During these, we could closely observe but by virtue of our roles we were also active participants in their learning processes. We encouraged them individually and in groups to reflect on group work and collaboration: We asked them what they had learned and how they would describe their contribution to the living lab exercise. Throughout the course, the students interacted with stakeholders, and we got to observe and participate in these dialogues. Thus, data in the students’ direct voice and perspective forms the basis of this article: anonymous student evaluations; named student evaluations; student reports, essays, and reflection pieces. This was supplemented by our participant observation and active role in seminars and collaboration workshops and the like.

In qualitative research in general but especially when the researcher is an active participant, the researchers’ positionality, subjectivity, and experiences are important considerations. Both as teachers and researchers we drew heavily on our personal experiences and subjectivity. Feminist geography (c.f. McDowell, 1992; Moss, 2002) alerts us to the possibilities of building on such experiences and emphasizes the researchers’ position in knowledge production, a subject position, which one needs to be critical and continuously reflexive to (McDowell, 1992; Moss, 2002; Winchester, 2000; Yin, 2014). Over the years, we have been involved in teaching and research in geography, human geography, secondary school teacher training, urban and regional planning and have taught and supervised students in various forms at bachelor, master’s, and doctoral levels. All of this means that the course development, coordination, organization, and content of the course “Strategic urban and regional planning” reflects us as much as it might reflect strategic urban and regional planning. There are obvious problems with researching a course and design one is so personally invested and involved in: it can be hard to read strongly worded student evaluations and treat them as merely data. Practicing reflexivity is an essential part of the research process: both data collection and analysis. By focusing on our own experiences throughout the research, we hoped to better understand our own roles, agency, and affect and to build a constructive critical distance to our own personal experience. Attempting individual critical reflection and using it as a bedrock for a reflexive methodology (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2018) is we suggest an important task and responsibility for researchers (and indeed teachers), and it is also a data source.

Putting CBL into practice through challenge-driven living labs

In this section, we describe the overall aim of the master’s course Strategic Urban and Regional Planning, followed by a description and critical discussion of the suggested chronology/phases of the living lab exercise.

The course is the first course in the strategic urban and regional planning master’s program. It addresses strategic planning in theory and practice and has three parts. The first 5 weeks follow a traditional course format, focused on lectures and seminars ending with an individual written exam and a course paper. The second part of the course introduces basic planning tools with a focus on Geographic Information System (GIS). The third part of the course is the focus of this article and is a 4-week-long living lab exercise where the students get to take on real-world cases in smaller collaborative groups. The exercise consists of introductory lectures, four-student-led workshops, a Lego serious play workshop, a poster conference, four supervision meetings, two individual reflection papers (800 words each), one individual feedback paper (1500 words), and a living lab group work report (8000 words) and presentation. Though the third part is in some ways a distinct component, the course should be seen as a whole since the first two parts are entirely oriented towards laying the foundations for the third. The entire 15 credit course is examined with a written exam (4 credits), individual written assignments (6 credits), active participation in seminars (3.5 credits), and a laboratory exercise (1.5 credits). The rest of the article is primarily focused on the 4-week-long living lab exercise component of the course.

A three-phase living lab methodology

The living lab course exercise rests upon three learning phases we drew from our reading on CBL approaches. Each phase places emphasis on student-driven processes and group work with continuous outputs and critical feedback loops: see Figure 1. The first phase focuses on engagement with a challenge through exploration, ideation, and conceptualization. The second phase focuses on experimentation where students further experiment with the challenge as well as assessing possible solutions in a real environment through fieldwork. The third phase is an evaluation phase and involves students finishing their project by writing a project report and individual reflection papers and by evaluating other groups as well as their own work.

Figure 1. Living Lab exercise based on a three-phase CBL methodology.

The entire exercise builds on student group work and collaboration. Students were divided into multidisciplinary groups, with four students in each group and each was assigned a university-based supervisor. The collaborative aspect principally aims to foster student interactive learning, but given the connection to a real case, it could potentially promote new approaches societal problems (Haigh & Ell, 2014). However, for CBL to work as a teaching and learning method, we cannot rely on the idea that students already know how to collaborate around a problem. Far too often students are given detailed information on academic issues and told to go off and discuss, with the assumption that they already have the tools to work effectively in groups or that balanced group work is in some way a natural emerging process. The diversity of the students in terms of disciplinary and national backgrounds as well the English being a second language for most of them posed further difficulties for a course founded on collaborative processes. One critical aspect of student-led group work is the problem of free riding (Brooks & Ammons, 2003; Hall & Buzwell, 2012) but by making the groups small and by giving them support and training on collaboration and group working techniques we hoped problems such as free-riding could be better managed within the group. We planned for several supportive instances throughout the living lab exercise to focus on collaborative methods and reflect on working methods and experiences: instances that we hoped would help link the phases in the students learning process.

Phase 1. Explore, ideate, conceptualize

In line with the CBL approach, where a challenge – defined in collaboration with stakeholders – is the core driver for learning (Malmqvist et al., 2015), the exercise starts with a real case from a nearby local area which was defined and introduced by a local actor or stakeholder. In 2021, the external actor was a non-profit organization working on an ongoing construction of a new student housing area in Linköping. In 2020, it a series of local planning and development challenges defined by the external actor, which was Linköping municipality.

During an introductory lecture, external actors introduce case or specific challenges they want to investigate as well as give a contextual background to them. By letting the students work with a challenge in a local context and place, the students potentially develop new and useful sustainability knowledge and competencies (Barth et al., 2007; Wiek et al., 2011) as well as potentially develop new motivations. An important aspect of the exercise was that the students got to view themselves as having prominent roles in supporting the transformative planning (Geels, 2002; Loorbach, 2007). Students reported that they were excited and motivated by the immediacy of taking on a real case and working together with a real stakeholder, and by potentially contributing to a tangible planning or development outcome. After the first workshops, some of the students also contacted the external stakeholders with further questions. As Kohn Rådberg et al. (2020) suggest, it is important that students get encouraged to “take control” of their own learning and for many of our students the experience of an accessible and open relationship with the external stakeholder was crucial to their taking control of the exercise themselves.

The aim of the explore, ideate, and conceptualize phase was twofold. Firstly, to create challenge-driven “living labs” that were firmly anchored in theory. In our instruction to the students, we made clear that the living lab had to be analysed through a challenge-driven lens and that this should be linked to sustainability challenges and innovation areas currently high on Swedish (Boverket, 2012) or European urban and regional political agendas (European Commission, 2021; UN, 2020) such as urbanisation, globalisation, climate change, digitalisation, or social equality.

The second aim was to actively use the different educational backgrounds of the students and to make them reflect upon their backgrounds. This was based on the pedagogical ideas that to practice working across disciplines and from a challenge driven perspective can stimulate sustainability competences (Barth et al., 2007; von Wirth et al., 2019). Each group member was encouraged at their first student-led workshop to give short (5–10 min) introductions of themselves during which they should reflect on their educational background, past thesis topics, and experience relevant to the challenge. After introducing their positionality, the workshop continued with a one and half hour exploration session where the students discussed and brainstormed which main arguments they wanted to focus on. Based on these discussions, the students then continued to search for information on the chosen topics. After this, there was another session where the students ideated and setup project plans with time plans and project risk assessments.

In the final part of the first workshop, the students got to – during a one and half hour session – elaborate and conceptualize their ideas by involving one or several promising ideas for how to approach the challenges in terms of feasibility, sustainability, and impact of the challenge. Here, students were encouraged to link to and apply earlier course components: e.g. lectures and seminars in the first weeks of the course on strategic urban and regional planning theory and megatrends.

Alongside the first organized workshop, the students also visited the site and area together. During this first field visit, they got to walk around and observe in their groups. This turned out to be a formative moment for most groups. Most groups reported that the site visit was not only an important first step in their process of getting to understand and interpret their challenge and area but crucial for grounding the collaborative structure of the group. Through open observation, they started to identify issues, clues, and questions that they wanted to explore further in their group work. Several groups completely changed their first ideas for solutions when they visited the area and could observe patterns and temporalities of spatial use.

The goal of the first workshop was that the students would start to engage with the challenge by bringing their own perspectives and experiences to the table, as well as having an initial idea about how the challenge and their ideas relate to theory and wider societal challenges. Students’ documentation of the workshop and fieldwork became the foundation of the first supervision meeting that followed the workshop. In their reflection papers, the students commented afterwards on how the first workshop helped them establish a good foundation for both the group work and the locally embedded challenge.

Phase 2. Experimentation

In the second phase of the exercise experimentation was in focus and the students got to test and develop their challenge (Nyström et al., 2014) and their ideas around it. The aim was to further experiment with concepts and ideas decided upon in phase one, as well as to start putting them into practice by assessing them in a real environment.

The first element in the experimental phase was to work out a real case scenario through a workshop based on Lego Serious Play (LSP) methodology. LSP is a group activity developed by The Lego Group in which participants collaboratively use blocks to design models of ideas which can be the focus for discussion or communication. This workshop was held by a teacher with experience in holding such workshops (LSP Certification). In the LSP workshop, the students focused on the living lab challenges by building metaphors with Lego bricks. The students focused on discussing solutions for their challenge, what they would like to achieve, as well as the desired societal impact. Throughout the workshop, it was made clear that the students had to initially take different approaches to the challenges and that they could have different possible solutions to them. The students ended up creating prototype solutions to the challenge and further developed working principles for the group work. Many students reported that at the start of the projects they had very different opinions about the challenge and that the LSP workshop was a productive activity since it helped the groups create a collective vision. Whilst LSP can be considered as gimmicky, potentially stressful, or a cynical sales excuse for proprietary plastic blocks, it has also been argued to be a method that helps student groups discover new approaches, solutions, and a deeper understanding of concepts (for discussion see Martin-Cruz et al., 2022; Warburton et al., 2022; Wheeler et al., 2020). What the LSP workshop underlined for us was that whatever exact method might be used, it can be beneficial in learning where students are to engage in collaborative experimentation to step outside the normal pedagogical spaces and tools. In particular, the exercise underlined to us the importance of fun and playfulness to experimentation and to how unexpected methods and challenges can help bond and cohere student groups.

The next step of the experimental phase involved group-based second field visits to test their initial ideas, visions, and solutions using on-site practices such as observation, interviews, and mapping. Field trips have a strong tradition within the field of human geography and have further been developed in planning (see for example Allen & Barbour, 2016; I. C. Fuller, 2012; I. A. N. Fuller et al., 2006; Holt-Jensen, 2018; Trygg & Köhler, 2015). Field studies as a teaching method are both reflexive and facilitate active learning. They often involve new experiences and impressions, which stimulate student motivation (Trygg & Köhler, 2015). Through field studies and trips, students get to experience the real world, and this may facilitate better understanding of theoretical and methodological aspects of the field (Jones, 2006) as well as help the students reflect and challenge their own knowledge (Wissmann, 2013). The fieldwork of the living lab exercise mainly involved one-off interviews, observations, and document studies, including studies of plans and other documented descriptions of the site. When the students came back from their fieldwork, they used their experiences to illustrate, discuss, and problematize literature that they focused on in phase 1 in a second supervision meeting.

The experimental phase was finished by a poster conference where the students presented their work in progress (now halfway into the project) to teachers, students, and the external actor. The students were instructed to use their posters to explain the project’s aim and purpose, their understanding of the challenge they were given, and indications of possible solutions. They were also encouraged to use documentation from the field visits such as pictures and maps. In their reflection documents, students commented that this was the first time that they had done a poster presentation and that they considered they had really learnt through making one and looking at others. Like with the earlier Lego workshop, they suggested that having to agree on a joint vision and solution and to visualise and communicate it together helped them come together as a group as well as to move forward in their work. The poster conference format places an emphasis on communication and presentation skills but also on active listening to others and peer feedback. Other studies have found that critical thinking can be stimulated by student-driven learning, where active communication, listening, and feedback from others is included (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020; van den Beemt et al., 2023). After each poster presentation, the students got feedback from teachers, but mainly from other students and from stakeholders. The feedback was appreciated by students and in their reflection papers students especially emphasized the valuable comments they got from the external actor as well as the importance of meeting with stakeholders face-to-face. The poster conference worked well. It seemed as a constructive social learning space where the students got feedback from various sources that enhanced the projects’ quality (Greiff et al., 2014; Haigh & Ell, 2014; Poort et al., 2019) and may have stimulated creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving (Redifer et al., 2019; Wechsler et al., 2018; Whiley et al., 2017). After the poster conference, the students submitted feedback papers and reflection papers on how they planned to continue with their living lab exercise in the last phase which also was discussed in a third supervision meeting.

Phase 3. Evaluate

Challenge-based learning rests on the belief that knowledge is created collaboratively and built upon a hybrid of collaboration and support (Larsson & Holmberg, 2018). The evaluation phase was focused on working with supporting and interactive instances including external groups, and constructive peer-based and student-led learning and reflection.

After the poster presentation and a third supervision meeting, the students handed in individually written feedback to one other group poster presentation with questions and suggestions to the solutions of the group’s challenge. Then, the students had to hand in individually written reflection pieces on the feedback they received, on their learning, and with a plan on how to proceed towards the final group report. The feedback was said to have helped the students with new directions and ideas for their projects, and having to write a reflection piece on the feedback helped them process it better and make connections to previous work. The nature of the feedback was particularly important to the students: “concrete” suggestions or constructive criticism was highly regarded in the reports. Students suggested that concrete suggestions motivated them and a lack of concrete suggestions for improvement left them disappointed.

After the feedback and reflection, the group met for more group work where they got to discuss together their feedback, which was followed by a fourth and final supervision meeting where their feedback was further discussed more thoroughly. During this final phase and final supervision, the students reflected on the desired impact from the two other phases. Here, we also wanted the students to reflect on the societal impact of their solutions, which is an important aspect of the living lab idea (Bulkeley et al., 2016), which sometimes meant that the students had to reframe and update their project work slightly.

The entire living lab exercise ended with the groups handing in a written report as well as presenting their results to their fellow students, teachers, and the external actors. In their final presentations, the students got direct as well as written feedback from teachers as well as oral feedback from external actors. The project report format had to critically examine how their challenge interplayed with the empirical setting and theoretical framework. In contrast to the poster outcome, which was more empirically driven, all project reports had to be well grounded in the course literature and linked to the course goals.

Together with the final report, the students also had to hand in an individually written assignment where they reflected upon how the group work had proceeded throughout the exercise and what their individual role in the exercise had been. Some of the students reflected on the difficulties merging the different academic backgrounds when taking on their challenge initially. Almost every student stressed that coming together as a group was a rather time-consuming process and to work actively with a different educational background was at times a challenge. However, many stressed that in the end they felt that the group collaboration focus had enriched their experience of the living lab exercise. It became clear from the reports that the student groups that meet face-to-face most frequently succeeded best at reaching consensus in the group. The students also described the exercise as inspiring and that it had made them feel creative, imaginative, and independent. Many of the students also stressed how the real case and working with an external stakeholder was particularly motivating. The overall written comments from the reflection reports back up these points of the challenges of collaboration but also highlight that the students considered the living lab exercises to have been particularly successful aspects of the course.

Conclusion

Urban and regional planning programs have an important role to play in educating students to manage sustainable transitions. This is especially true perhaps in countries like Sweden, where urban and regional planning graduates tend to overwhelmingly work in local and regional authorities or in private sector organizations focused on planning and consultation. In our teaching practice, we have been attempting to explore how living labs can serve one potential methodology for working towards change as well as the relevant knowledge and skills needed to tackle such transitions. Our interest was piqued by suggestions that living labs can foster innovative knowledge co-creation and experimentation in both research and practice to improve urban sustainability (Laborgne et al., 2021) and by the suggestion that they can be scaled up and transferred to other contexts and eventually generate a broader system change such as sustainable transformation (Bulkeley et al., 2018). Literature suggests that educational engagement with living lab approaches could be both a study tool and potentially an arena for change. So far, our experience suggests that a combined CBL and living labs methodology can be an interesting foundation for sustainable transformation learning, but we cannot say that it has proven to be an arena for tangible change.

Through the living lab exercise, the students seemed to develop better general competences (or transferable skills) in transformative planning, including aspects, inputs and insights from actors and processes outside the university. The combination of a CBL approach and the context of a living lab has several potential beneficial effects for students of sustainable transformation. The most prominent advantage of working with a living lab in combination with a CBL approach is that at the very core of the exercise is a “real-life” sustainable transition challenge which the students got the opportunity to cooperate with stakeholders on planning for. The study shows that when master’s students get to work together with stakeholders in real-life cases designed towards planning for sustainable transitions, new and useful sustainability knowledge and competencies are constructed as well as new motivations and roles. We then suggest that educational engagement with living lab approaches can be a useful study tool and a formative experience for new generations of planners and geographers. We suggest that a challenge-driven living lab methodology can be useful and important in teaching sustainable transformation in planning, geography, and cognate disciplines.

Student groups and collaboration within the groups are crucial to this type of exercise, and indeed the entire learning approach is based on the ways in which collaboration spurs individual learning through engagement, activation, and empowerment. Our approach included a strong collaborative aspect and a range of collaborative settings, spaces, and types of output, as well as a deliberate focus on collaborative methods and self-reflection on the learning process. These sometimes led to new and unexpected ways to learn, understand, and deal with sustainable transformation. We think that integrating interactive, playful, and non-standard teaching moments that students have probably not experienced before in the context of their studies – such as the Lego Serious play workshop or the poster conference – may have helped provoke an interest in new and innovative approaches, helped them learn more about collaboration, and hopefully helped our students learn more about transformative planning.

Our experiences from teaching the living lab exercise suggest to us the value of working with, or integrating into courses, challenge-based collaborative learning approaches and “real-life” challenges. Our experience points to the added value for student engagement and active learning from including projects consisting of various actors including external groups. Our experience also underlined the learning benefits of adding components focused on self-reflection on the learning process. Our experience tentatively suggests that teaching using CBL and living lab could potentially contribute to sustainable transformation learning and to students actively contributing to sustainable transitions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).