Urban areas account for around 50% of global solid waste generation. In the last decade, the European Union has supported numerous initiatives aiming at reducing waste generation by promoting shifts towards Circular Economy (CE) approaches. Governing this process has become imperative. This article focuses on the results of a governance analysis of six urban regions in Europe involved in the Horizon 2020 project REPAiR. By means of semi-structured interviews, document analysis and workshops with local stakeholders, for each urban area a list of governance challenges which hinder the necessary shift to circularity was drafted. In order to compare the six cases, the various challenges have been categorized using the PESTEL-O method. Results highlight a significant variation in policy contexts and the need for these to evolve by adapting stakeholders’ and policy-makers’ engagement and diffusing knowledge on CE. Common challenges among the six regions include a lack of an integrated guiding framework (both political and legal), limited awareness among citizens, and technological barriers. All these elements call for a multi-faceted governance approach able to embrace the complexity of the process and comprehensively address the various challenges to completing the shift towards circularity in cities.

Resource consumption and related waste production are still rapidly increasing all over the world, leading to social and environmental challenges and to the production of the so-called 'wastescapes'. Peri-urban areas-in-between urban and rural territories-are particularly vulnerable and prone to develop into wastescapes because they are generally characterised by mixed functions and/or monofunctional settlements, as well as by fragmentation in a low-density territory that is often crossed by large infrastructure networks. Moreover, peri-urban areas are generally the selected locations for the development of plants for waste management. In this way, they are crossed by waste flows of a different nature, in a landscape of operational infrastructures and wasted landscapes. Implementing Circular Economy (CE) principles, interpreting waste and wastescapes as resources, is a way to significantly reduce raw material and (soil) resource consumption, improving cities' metabolism. A circular approach can positively affect the spatial, social and environmental performances of periurban areas. However, the transition towards a CE presents many challenges. This article outlines an approach to address these challenges, presenting a co-creation process among researchers, experts and stakeholders within Living Labs (LLs) processes. LLs are physical and virtual spaces, aiming at the co-creation of site-specific eco-innovative solutions (EIS) and strategies. In the LLs, public-private-people partnerships are developed by applying an iterative methodology consisting of five phases: Co-Exploring, Co-Design, Co-Production, Co-Decision, and Co-Governance. This article presents a case study approach, analysing the co-creation methodology applied in two peri-urban living labs, located in the Metropolitan Areas of Naples (Italy) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands), within REPAiR Horizon2020 research project.

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