At Placemaking Europe, we support the people who make cities more human. Practitioners who work with communities, listen, test, translate, and build bridges between daily life and public institutions. Increasingly, these placemakers are not only outside the system, they are inside municipalities, working from within. Not all civil servants are placemakers yet, but many of the most inspiring ones already are. They are nodes of public innovation, hinges that connect citizens and governments, the civic and the bureaucratic, action and reflection.
Over the past two years, we have been working with some of the bravest of them through the Cities in Placemaking programme, a city-to-city learning partnership that brings together European municipalities committed to embedding placemaking into their governance structures.
The first phase: Making placemaking systemic
The first edition (2023–2025) gathered twelve pioneering cities, from Helsinki to Reggio Emilia, from Wrocław to The Hague, who co-created the Agenda for Making Placemaking Systemic, a shared roadmap to tackle today’s urban challenges through public space.
They recognised that issues like climate adaptation, social divides, or housing inequality cannot be solved in silos but require collaborative, place-based approaches. Through eight learning milestones, these cities explored how to:
- Innovate through organisational reform and adaptive systems.
- Involve communities through co-creation and shared leadership.
- Invest in resources and opportunities for initiatives to flourish.
They committed to thinking long term and acting short term, to valuing diversity and intercultural inclusion, and to balancing the hardware, software, and orgware of the city: its physical, social, and institutional layers.
Together, they demonstrated that public space is not a side project but a foundation for democracy, health, sustainability, and trust.
The next phase: Join the sharing structure
If you are a placemaker inside a city ( a civil servant, a planner, a cultural or environmental officer trying to make things work differently) this programme is for you.
Join us to demonstrate, together, the value of public space: arguably the most effective and equitable investment a city can make. Well-designed and well-governed public spaces are multipliers; they unlock other forms of impact such as innovation, inclusion, community resilience, and long-term investment.
The programme brings together participants from a range of city departments – urban planning, culture, environment, social services, mobility — working together toward a shared agenda. The strength of the programme lies in these cross-departmental collaborations, where ideas are tested, adapted, and scaled within real institutional systems.
The next two-year cycle of Cities in Placemaking will continue this journey through a renewed structure:
- Four pillars of learning and exchange, combining onboarding, hybrid workshops, and mentorship, and coming together throughout the year to share progress and insights during the Placemaking Week Europe festival.
- A community of cities learning together, peer to peer.
- Shared milestones, starting with the next one in Rotterdam and The Hague, on 1–3 December 2025 (you can still join this one).
If your city is ready to take this step, apply before the end of the year to join the new cohort and become part of a European movement of practitioners changing city governance from within.
Cities in Placemaking is an independent programme funded by participating municipalities through a yearly contribution adapted to their size and resources, and supported by Placemaking Europe, a foundation based in the Netherlands.
For more information, contact:
