Background and aim. Temporary use of vacant spaces—the short-term activation of properties awaiting transformation—has gained recognition for its potential to foster urban revitalization. While such uses provide a platform for experimentation, accessibility, and social inclusion through participatory and cultural activities, they often remain precarious and underutilized as strategic tools for circular economy. This study aims to explore how specific hybrid approaches to temporary real estate management can transform temporary use into a social circular economy strategy, balancing social values with market logics.

Methods and Data. This research employs a qualitative analysis, first defining a framework from literature and then analysing specific temporary use projects through a retrospective case analysis of three cases by Plateau Urbain (France), communa (Belgium), and Stad in de Maak (Netherlands). Data collection included interviews, project documentation, and field observations, allowing an in-depth exploration of the enabling conditions for successful hybrid approaches in creating social value.

Findings. This study makes three key contributions. First, it conceptualizes collaborative temporary use as a social circular strategy, clearly defining the evolution of the concept and its potential in temporary real estate adaptive reuse. Second, by drawing on the literature on organizational hybridity and case study analysis, it identifies key enabling conditions, such as tweaking the balance between social value and market logic over time to recalibrate impact—that underpin temporary use projects as social circular economy strategies. Third, it offers a framework to determine whether a temporary real estate reuse initiative can function as a social circular economy strategy.

Theoretical / Practical / Societal implications. This study offers theoretical insights into hybrid organizing for urban development and practical recommendations for integrating temporary reuse of real estate into social circular economy frameworks. Societally, it underscores the potential for collaborative temporary use to foster circular urban transformation by balancing economic goals with community-driven social value creation.

Transitioning towards a circular built environment and turning waste into resources have become one of the new sustainability paradigms today. However, a circular transition can be considered a ‘wicked problem’. The multiple dimensions and scales of the circular transition and its substantial spatial implications fit well into the planning approach of Geodesign. The Horizon 2020 funded project “Resource Management in the periurban Areas - Going beyond Urban Metabolism (REPAiR)” implemented an innovative Geodesign approach. Moreover, it explored its capability to support spatial decision-making processes for the circular economy transition of the built environment within urban planning practices. This article aims to understand to what extent a process of Geodesign, which is conducted with the support of a digital tool and a Living Lab approach, can support the creation of localised circular economy strategies and foster the circular economy transition in cities and territories. The analysis explores and compares the results of three European cases -Amsterdam, Hamburg and Naples. It considers the kind of data input required to run the process in every phase, the stakeholders involved and their typology, the specific urban or territorial, planning and governance scales of analysis, and the final output definition after the Geodesign process implementation. The approach outputs constitute a decision support system for easing negotiations between local actors regarding the circularity strategies to implement. The findings reveal an intertwinement between different forms of knowledge included in the process, ranging from sustainability to governance and design, and the actors engaged in planning a circularity transition spatially. However, even using similar starting data, the local information and the starting conditions strongly influence the process and the types of strategies elaborated in each case.

This research aims to define an integrated methodological approach for activating and implementing Urban Living Labs focused on cultural resources, landscapes and assets, and their enhancement, shaped by the role of the local community and significant historical sites. The CHANGES project - Cultural Heritage Active Innovation for Next-Gen Sustainable Society - is the context to design a circular Urban Living Lab approach where evaluation acquires a central and enabling role. Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation (SMCE) is suitable for inclusion in this decision-making context, instigating a Collaborative Decision-Making Process within co-design phases that actively engage diverse stakeholders, incorporating preferences and facilitating consensus building. Specifically, SOCRATES represents an interesting multicriteria method to investigate for this purpose as part of a methodology that consists of multiple methods of work, design and research. The methodological proposal is the Heritage Communities Urban Living Labs (HeCo-ULLs) approach, a circular framework recognising multidimensional complex values and the aspiration to generate new, locally rooted, and community-driven values. The proposal incorporates the SOCRATES method across various Urban Living Lab development stages. This methodological approach has to be implemented and validated case-by-case, involving local actors and considering the peculiarities of different cultural heritages and related contexts.