On 7 May 2026, we gathered in Paiporta — a town that, a year and a half after the devastating DANA floods, is still rebuilding, still healing, and still asking hard questions about what recovery really means. The event, Innovació per a la Recuperació, is a collaboration between elDiario.es Comunitat Valenciana and Placemaking Europe, and brought together researchers, local leaders, mayors, MEPs, community organisations and practitioners from across Spain and Europe.
The question at the heart of the day was deceptively simple: how do we rebuild not just faster, but better? Not just the roads and the sewers and the squares, but the trust, the social bonds, the sense of a future that communities can actually believe in.
A Three-Phase Process
May 7th was not a standalone event. It was the third phase of an ongoing monitoring process that Placemaking Europe has been developing alongside this territory since the floods.
We began by listening — a survey capturing the lived experience of the people most affected, in their own words. We then brought that knowledge into a workshop with local stakeholders: testing ideas, building shared understanding, and grounding the conversation in the realities on the ground. May 7th was the public phase: bringing it all into open dialogue, with the experts, practitioners and decision-makers who need to act on it.
This three-phase structure reflects a core belief: that meaningful recovery cannot be designed from the outside and handed down. It has to be built with the people living it, through a process that takes time seriously.
This was the second edition of Innovació per a la Recuperació. The first took place in Catarroja, another of the municipalities hit hardest by the DANA, and followed the same three-phase structure: listening first, then convening, then opening the conversation publicly. Coming back a year later, in a different town, with a different set of voices, but the same underlying commitment, is itself a statement. Recovery is not an event. It is a process, and it requires people willing to stay with it.
