Johannes Riegler

Summary

Hi there, 
I am Johannes, an experienced urbanist and geographer from Vienna, Austria. My daily work focusses on bridging urbanism, knowledge exchange, urban research and adding innovative communication techniques and formats into the mix. For almost 15 years, I have been working on bridging the European and neighbourhood level as a generalist expert on urban matters across disciplines. I would love to work with you as an URBACT Lead Expert or Ad-Hoc expert on your network. 

What I can offer: 

• Extensive experience in sustainable urban development: a strong focus on nature-positive strategies, biodiversity, and regenerative urbanism.
• Proven ability to design and facilitate impactful learning processes and knowledge transfer across diverse urban contexts, ensuring that innovation is translated, shared and adapted to local realities.
• A solid understanding of EU urban policy frameworks and multi-level governance, gained through active involvement in European programmes and partnerships.
• Expertise in designing and facilitating participatory and co-creative processes, including stakeholder engagement, peer learning, etc.
• Innovative communication skills, with the ability to translate complex urban topics into accessible narratives through articles, podcasts and public dialogues.
• Practical knowledge of transnational cooperation, including working with cities across Europe in collaborative innovation processes.
• Strong interpersonal and intercultural skills, fostering trust-based collaboration among municipalities, researchers, civil society, and creative practitioners.
• Vast experience in curating and moderating workshops, learning sessions, and exchange formats tailored to both policy and practitioner audiences and speaking at sessions and conferences.
• Excellent writing and editorial skills, producing high quality content for dissemination, learning and strategic reflection.

What I am currently doing:

• I am working as an Innovation Expert with three European Urban Initiative - Innovative Actions: WATSUPS with the City of Mechelen, REWILD with the City of Ghent and Blue4Green with the City of Bruges. All of the projects are pushing the limits on what it means to build nature-positive cities and ensure that urban greening and water projects go hand in hand.
  Besides guiding and advising the projects on different matters and challenges, I am capturing the knowledge and innovations they create. If you are curious about my outputs, feel free to have a look at one of my articles such as "Otters in the old town?!" and "Where the pavement ends. Can Ghent become a truly rewilded city?", or listen to an EUI episode of the Cities Reimagined Podcast.
• In early 2025, I founded anthropocene.city (a.c), an agency for urban research and communication. A.c was found out of the recognition that conventional dissemination activities in and around urban projects do not lead to genuine learning. We bring together a team of experts on urbanism and creatives with diverse expertise and experiences to create impact and enable urban transformations. www.anthropocene.city (the website is currently under development and will be published in Sept/Oct 2025).
• Currently serving as a member of the Management Board for the Driving Urban Transitions Partnership (DUT - https://dutpartnership.eu), a research and innovation programme led by 28 member states in cooperation with the European Commission. Within DUT, I am responsible for designing and executing multi-actor processes: bringing together research communities, public urban administrations, and urban change makers, encouraging collaboration, knowledge exchange, and co-creation of approaches to transform cities towards regenerative and liveable urban environments.
• Since 2023, I am hosting and producing the Cities Reimagined Podcast, a show aiming at distilling knowledge and experiences from interactive conversations. The ambition was to have a format for deep conversations which link information, practical knowledge and experiences with personal and emotional anecdotes. Soon after started the podcast, the produced episodes turned into a tool for conveying complex messages in digestible language, engaging audiences and fostering community. You can find the show on all podcast platforms.

I am holding a Master's degree in Urbanism (MA) and a Bachelor's degree in Geography (BSc) from institutions in Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen, Madrid, [Budapest], and Klagenfurt. Furthermore, I am currently pursuing a Master's program on Regenerative Action at Ubiquity University (US).