Networks and cities' news

Five Cities, One Conversation: Article #2

Five Cities, One Conversation: What STEAM Is Teaching Us About the Future of Cities

III Quarterly Network Journal - When Culture Becomes a Cure for Urban Loneliness

Cities across Europe are increasingly turning to culture as a tool for strengthening social connections and improving well-being. This edition of the RECUP Network Journal explores how arts, creativity, and cultural participation can help address loneliness and social isolation, while supporting more inclusive and resilient urban communities. 

Charting new waters of policy change in Hydro Heritage Cities

Sandra Rainero, the Network’s Lead Expert’s reflects on how water heritage is reshaping practice, partnerships and policy paths - and what the transfer process teaches us halfway through the journey. 

From Loneliness to Connection: How Bielsko Biała Turned Culture into a Shared Urban Experience

In Bielsko-Biała, culture is no longer treated as a calendar of events. It has become a living process that happens between people, in everyday places, and through shared experiences. This shift shaped the city’s Testing Actions developed within the URBACT IV REinventing Culture in Urban Places project’s network. 

Bielsko-Biała began not with assumptions, but with listening. Through its URBACT Local Group, the city gathered cultural institutions, artists, NGOs, community stakeholders and reprsentatives of municipal departments, to examine one of today’s most urgent urban challenges: loneliness.

Loneliness was understood not only as a personal feeling, but as a structural issue affecting many European cities. The ULG group identified several causes: weakened social ties, lack of belonging to place and community, difficulty initiating contact with others, growing individualism, digital overstimulation leading to isolation, reduced sense of safety in public space, and limited influence over shared urban environments.

This diagnosis led to the creation of the “Tree of Loneliness” – a participatory tool mapping the roots and consequences of social isolation. More importantly, it created a clear direction for action. The city chose to test whether culture, when designed as a participatory and place-based experience, could rebuild relationships between people, neighbourhoods and nature.

TactiCity Kick-off meeting in Milan

TacityCity network cities getting together in Milan

Inside Copenhagen: urban security and local practice at CITISENSE’s 5th Transnational Meeting