Urban planning is crucial to promote resilience and liveability of cities in the face of current urbanization patterns and climate change challenges. Nature-based solutions (NBS) are viable alternatives to grey infrastructure, with multiple environmental, social and economic benefits and co-benefits, comprehensively contributing to the sustainable development goals. Despite their widely recognized importance, socio-economic dynamics are less studied – namely in simulation approaches. Additionally, they are rarely considered alongside policy instruments to either steer or potentiate the NBS socio-economic and urbanization impacts. Hence, the objective of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of several simulated NBS and policy instruments in different case studies with different socio-economic contexts. It aims to provide municipalities and policy-makers evidence to learn from and extrapolate expected outcomes based on urban characteristics. From a participatory approach perspective, the methodology included NBS co-design workshops with municipalities as well as NBS and policy instrument scenario simulations. Regarding NBS impacts, attractiveness has proven to be the most relevant characteristic, in combination with urban pre-greenness, size and/or location. Furthermore, NBS in combination with policy instruments demonstrated the potential to maximize NBS benefits and control urbanization processes, such as gentrification and urban expansion, namely though real-estate taxes, subsidies and zoning.