Urban planning is often highlighted as an important tool for the transition towards energy-efficient and sustainable futures, but faces great complexity and challenges such as strong sectoral perspectives, weak contact between different planning levels and a strong growth-oriented discourse. This article discusses how a transition can be facilitated by a complexity-theoretical perspective on urban planning for energy-efficient and sustainable station communities. As complex adaptive systems (CAS), cities and regions are characterized by a diversity of niches, regimes and landscapes – built structures and planning actors - that interact across different scales and borders in cyclically-recurring development phases. The systems are also characterized by unpredictability, multiple stable states, self-organization towards emergent diversity and an increasing number of levels of order. Co-creative planning in Västra Götaland, a Swedish region that undergoes a complex, spatially uneven development, is used as a case study. The study exemplifies how the CAS perspective opens for the application of resilience-theoretical concepts and transdisciplinary, experimental multi-level planning exploring possible futures, advocating the development of more network-and nodal-oriented structures. Station communities can then be understood as the network´s independent but contextually influenced and mutually interacting nodes, which opens for new approaches that can support the transition.