Resilient Playscapes: Dual-use of public spaces for resilience and everyday life

Main topic: Dual-use urban spaces for climate resilience: rethinking sports and green areas as multifunctional infrastructures that combine everyday wellbeing uses with climate adaptation functions such as flood management, heat mitigation, and ecological regeneration.
• Rethinking sports and green areas as dual-use urban infrastructures.
• Positioning traditional public spaces into strategic assets for climate adaptation and everyday urban life.
• Climate-adaptive public spaces: designing parks and sports areas that can absorb, retain, and manage water, mitigate heat, and respond to extreme weather events.
• Dual-use sport and green infrastructure: transforming mono-functional sports facilities into flexible, multi-purpose spaces that combine daily recreational use with climate resilience functions.
• Participatory and co-managed urban spaces: involving citizens, local stakeholders, and user groups in the co-design, testing, and management of these multifunctional environments.
• Integrated and adaptive urban governance: aligning urban planning, environmental policies, sports strategies, and risk management into a coherent framework for dual-use spaces.
Context:
The city of La Nucía, in Alicante, Spain, has long positioned itself as a “City of Sport,” with a strong network of public sports facilities and active community engagement. While these investments have successfully promoted physical activity and local identity, a new generation of challenges is emerging, shared by many small and medium-sized European cities.
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including heatwaves and heavy rainfall episodes, putting pressure on urban infrastructure and public spaces. At the same time, cities face growing demands for inclusive, accessible, and multifunctional environments that support everyday wellbeing.

Across Europe, climate adaptation strategies and green infrastructure are often developed separately from sports and recreational planning. As a result, many public spaces remain mono-functional, underutilized, and unable to contribute fully to urban resilience.
Small and medium-sized cities face a particular challenge: how to optimize limited urban space and resources while addressing climate risks, social inclusion, and quality of life. This creates a critical opportunity to rethink sports and green areas as dual-use infrastructures, capable of delivering both daily social value and environmental performance.
The main innovation of this project is to move from single-purpose public spaces to multifunctional, climate-responsive urban infrastructures that are actively used, tested, and improved in real-life conditions.
Rather than focusing only on planning, the project emphasizes implementation, experimentation, and transfer, in line with the URBACT Action Network approach.
This includes:
• Testing how existing sports and green spaces can be adapted to integrate climate functions such as water retention, cooling, and biodiversity support.
• Developing practical methods for balancing usability, safety, and resilience in everyday urban environments.
• Creating governance models that enable cross-departmental collaboration and long-term management of dual-use spaces.
• Generating transferable knowledge through real-life experimentation and peer exchange between cities.
The project builds on emerging approaches such as nature-based solutions, sponge city models, and climate-resilient urban design, while grounding them in the everyday reality of citizens and local administrations.
European added value:
• Demonstrates how cities can transform existing public spaces into cost-effective, multifunctional infrastructures addressing both climate risks and social needs.
• Provides tested and transferable solutions for dual-use sports and green spaces applicable across diverse European urban contexts.
• Positions small and medium-sized cities as key actors in climate adaptation innovation, particularly in optimizing limited urban space.
• Contributes to major European priorities, including climate resilience, sustainable urban development, public health, and social inclusion.
• Strengthens the practical implementation of integrated urban policies through experimentation, peer learning, and knowledge transfer, in line with URBACT IV Action Networks.