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.

In this chapter we trace the journey of the Polish Research Institute (PIZ) archive at Lund University Library from the making of the archive at Lund, to its deposition at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, to its return to Lund University Library, and its early digitization. Studying this archival journey, we specifically engage with a set of different ethical dilemmas that have been involved in these each of these processes and spatialities. We suggest that the collection and creation of the archive until the point of digitization has been a history of contested spaces and this journey has involved the creation and maintenance of different kinds of ‘vulnerabilities'.