Placemaking CEE is a regional network for practitioners working across Central and Eastern Europe: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine, with the door open to neighbours who recognise themselves in the same conditions.
We started it because our countries share a physical and social inheritance that placemaking literature rarely describes. Public space here often means the ground floor of a socialist apartment block, an inner courtyard with unclear ownership, a market square in a town that lost its factory. Participatory practice is younger than in Western Europe and EU funds shape what gets built more than municipal budgets do.
The network wants to create:
A monthly CEE-wide call, open to anyone working in or near placemaking in the region.
Four communities of practice: apartment bloc urbanism; resilience; intergenerational placemaking; energy communities and the green transition. Each produces at least two outputs a year, from peer-reviewed articles to policy papers and practical toolkits.
At least two joint EU project applications a year, with consortiums formed inside the network.
An annual in-person gathering, the first at Placemaking Week Europe in Wrocław, September 2026.
Placemaking CEE is co-created with its members and coordinated by DearNeighbour (Asociația ÎntreVecini) in Bucharest, under Placemaking Europe. We work alongside national networks such as Placemaking Poland and help new ones get started where people want them. If sub-regional or national groups eventually spin out of this network, that counts as success, in the way the V4 has worked for other kinds of cooperation.
