The final conference of the TRANSFORMER project took place at Ruhr University Bochum on 18 and 19 June. Funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, the two-year project developed and pilot-tested transition super labs (TSL) as a new governance approach to designing long-term systemic transition frameworks. Scaling up the living lab approach to accelerate the transition of regions towards climate neutrality, TSLs have been set up and tested in Emilia-Romagna, Lower Silesia, Western Macedonia and the Ruhr Metropolis. Jointly organized by project coordinators Prof. Matthias Kiese and Dr Thomas Meister at RUB’s Institute of Geography with project partner Business Metropole Ruhr (BMR), the final event brought the 13 project partners together with and leading experts to present and discuss the project's results and insights.

Following welcome messages by RUB Rector Prof. Martin Paul and Jörg Kemna, CEO of BMR, three keynote speeches provided context for the TSL approach. Katja Witte from the Wuppertal Institute stressed the relevance of participatory solutions and identified complexity and the diffusion of responsibilities as key obstacles in regional transition processes. As a pioneer of research on social innovation, Prof. Jürgen Howaldt of the Social Research Centre at TU Dortmund highlighted the relevance of social innovation in urban transition processes, before independent consultant Dr Gerd Schönwälder reflected on the emergence and the evolution of the TSL idea.

After the presentation of the TRANSFORMER project and its main findings, Dr Wolfgang Backhaus, Managing Director of project partner Rupprecht Consult, moderated an expert panel to reflect on the key learnings from the project. Representatives from three other European regions provided a positive feedback from the project’s User Forum, an instrument to disseminate and test the methodology outside the four TSL regions during the project’s lifespan. On the second day, field trips to WILO SE in Dortmund and thyssenkrupp Steel in Duisburg complemented previous discussions with insightful company cases on transition challenges and solutions, before participants reflected on key findings and impressions in the final wrap-up. Started in September 2022, project funding is going to run until August 2024.