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.
What began as an experimental collaboration has now evolved into an ongoing partnership that welcomes a new cohort of cities leading the way in making placemaking systemic, integrating it across departments, linking it to policy and investment, and proving that change from within is not only possible but powerful.
The Cities in Placemaking programme is an ongoing learning partnership for municipal public administrations, grounded in peer-to-peer learning, mutual exchanges, and learning from real-life examples. Within the programme, our mission is to create the next generation of placemaking experts in governance, and together we strive to:
The Cities in Placemaking program fosters mutual learning among ambitious placemakers working for European cities European cities, focusing on innovative urban transformation. By sharing challenges and exploring the core of our work, we aim to find solutions that make urban spaces more inclusive, resilient, healthy, equitable, and sustainable through placemaking.
Through the program, we aim to promote placemaking as a way to inspire communities to reimagine public spaces at their core. Acknowledging that new solutions often challenge traditional methods, we aim to break down silos by showcasing successful initiatives and practices. This helps to engage more civil servants in placemaking as a path to a sustainable, resilient future focused on community well-being. We also explore mutual benefits for various departments.
By addressing placemaking challenges and organizational bottlenecks, learning to collaborate across departments, and shifting to long-term, holistic approaches, we aim to develop a roadmap for systemic change centered on placemaking. Over the course of this 2-year process, we aspire to cultivate a group of innovative, solution-oriented city representatives recognized as pioneers of urban transformation in Europe.
By bringing placemaking into governance, Cities in Placemaking is setting a new standard for healthy, inclusive, and vibrant public spaces across Europe. As we move forward, we continue to advocate for systemic change, break down silos within municipalities, and equip civil servants with the tools to lead this transformation. Through structured, hybrid exchanges every three months, we connect municipal practitioners to refine systemic placemaking approaches, strengthen peer learning and implementation capacities, and foster deeper organizational integration and collaboration – both within cities and across the wider European network.
