Enjoy below the introduction of the Hydro-Heritage Cities Network final report, authored by our Lead Expert Sandra Rainero and Ad Hoc Expert Chiara Lucchini. A big thank you to both for being with us, in the twists and turns of our Hydro-Heritage slide, always available and supportive all along.
You can find the full -and much inspiring- final report here https://urbact.eu/sites/default/files/2026-08/FINAL%20HHC.pdf
What exactly travels when innovation is transferred?
During the summer break, I often spend late afternoons by the Tagliamento river near my home, on the border between Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia in Northeast Italy. Watching its waters flow (and sometimes recede in drought) I find in the river, or “Tiliment” in Friulian language, a metaphor for my two-year experience with the URBACT innovation transfer of the Hydro-Heritage Cities Network. Water rarely moves in a straight line, it bends around obstacles, disappears beneath the surface, re-emerges unexpectedly and takes the shape of the landscapes and structures it meets. Innovation moves between cities in much the same way.
Hydro-Heritage Cities started from a simple premise: in Chalandri, Cultural H.ID.R.A.N.T. had brought the Hadrian Aqueduct back into urban life, transforming an almost invisible infrastructure into heritage, environmental resource and urban commons. Its water found contemporary use, public spaces were regenerated and schools, residents, cultural organisations and technical partners became part of a new local ecosystem. The innovation was not a single intervention, but a way of linking water management, cultural memory, climate resilience and community participation.
The five transfer cities, Elche in Spain, Roeselare in Belgium, Rome in Italy, Serpa in Portugal and Sombor in Serbia, did not share Chalandri’s aqueduct, institutional setting or history. They had, instead, their own relationships with water, sometimes visible, sometimes forgotten and their task was to understand what made Chalandri’s practice innovative and explore what those principles could become elsewhere.
There’s a central argument throughout these pages and this is that innovation transfer is not replication, but translation. What travels is a changing combination of ideas, principles, methods and questions and, as these encounter new physical, institutional, cultural and political landscapes, some elements take root, others lose relevance, and unexpected possibilities emerge. Transfer therefore transforms not only the receiving cities, but also the original practice, which Chalandri has seen reflected back through the interpretations of other places.
This reading is consistent with policy-transfer literature. Dolowitz and Marsh1 distinguish between copying, emulating, combining and using a policy as inspiration, while more recent work on urban policy mobility shows how policies are selected, narrated, reassembled and altered as they move. McCann and Ward2 describe this as mobility and mutation, much like watercourses. In this perspective, adaptation is not a failure of transfer, but the way transfer actually happens.
Hydro-Heritage Cities can be read in these terms, because Cultural H.ID.R.A.N.T. offered principles, methods and practical examples, but each city reconstructed them around its own water systems, heritage, commu- nities and institutional possibilities. The relevant question is not how faithfully Chalandri was reproduced, but what each city selected, how it changed through use, and whether the resulting proposition retained the original ambition to connect infrastructure, memory, environment and civic life.
Chiara Lucchini and I look at that journey through the three mutually reinforcing pillars of the URBACT Method: participation, integration and action-oriented learning. They are used here as an analytical lens rather than a checklist, because their value lies in the way they interact. We also look at the legacy that the Network leaves in terms of policy and future developments.
The analysis draws on the network’s full arc, starting from the transferability assessments, city visits and exchanges, bilateral conversations to the mid-term review, local testing actions, and to the final ULG check- up and review of the Investment and Continuity Plans. It is a deliberately hopeful, but not uncritical analysis. Hydro-Heritage Cities shows how an URBACT network can open perspectives, build unlikely alliances and turn neglected water heritage into a contemporary urban question but it also shows how difficult it is to move from enthusiasm to ownership, from stakeholder diversity to integrated decisions, and from an attractive plan to a funded and governed programme of action.
Water always finds a way, but never without resistance and the same is true of innovation. What matters is not whether it arrives unchanged, but whether, in taking a new course, it leaves behind new capacities, relationships and possibilities for action.
Continue reading the full final report here https://urbact.eu/sites/default/files/2026-08/FINAL%20HHC.pdf
