Picture a city of 80 000, somewhere in Europe. Employment is stable, the centre looks fine from a distance, the mayor has no reason to call an emergency meeting. But look closer, and you’ll notice the cracks. The average age of residents has risen by three years in the past decade. Three-in-five graduates leave within a year of finishing university. The number of ground-floor shops has dropped by a quarter, replaced by vape stores and vacant units. A growing share of the local tech workforce is male, over 40, and not being replaced, while after 22:00, the city centre empties, because no one has thought of life at night as a policy question.
None of this makes headlines or triggers alarm bells in city halls, and that is exactly the problem. These are the kind of changes that unfold so gradually that by the time they show up in official reports and records, the room for strategic response has already narrowed significantly.
Between 2023 and 2025, six URBACT Action Planning Networks, involving comprehensively more than 50 European cities, addressed local development from different angles. Read on to find out more about C4TALENT, Cities@Heart, Cities After Dark, Residents of the Future, Remote-IT and TechDiversity* and how they leveraged the URBACT Method to plan for early, deliberate, and sometimes even counterintuitive, action.
One structural challenge, six entry points
At the start of the 2023-2025 Action Planning Network cycle, partner cities agreed on their primary challenge: not necessarily having the right solution in mind, but recognising the problem early enough.
Some of these networks tackled brain drain and how outmigration and demographic decline can reshape a city. Both C4TALENT, led by Nyíregyháza (HU) with 10 partner cities, and Residents of the Future, led by Šibenik (HR) with eight partners, looked at the pressures associated with ageing populations and the departure of younger residents.
Cities@Heart and Cities After Dark focused on places that have lost their everyday purpose. The former, led by the Greater Paris Metropolis (FR) with 10 partners, worked on city centres hollowed out by e-commerce, suburbanisation, tourism pressure and fragmented governance. The latter, comprising the Lead Partner Braga (PT) and nine partners, extended that lens into the hours after dark, challenging the assumption that the night is primarily a problem to be managed.
Remote-IT, led by Dubrovnik (HR) with seven partners, and TechDiversity, led by Trikala (EL) and eight partners, treated inclusion and adaptation as more than social add-ons, but as economic imperatives. This involved exploring structural shifts to remote and hybrid work, both inside city administrations and outside them, and the exclusion of women, migrants, people with disabilities and other under-represented groups from local tech and digital economies.
What do brain drain, empty shop fronts, deserted city centres at night, demographic decline, the rise of remote work and the exclusion of women from tech all have in common? They are all symptoms of local economies designed for a world that no longer exists and governance structures have not caught up.
The partner cities in each network developed Integrated Action Plans to overcome the structural challenges and capitalise on lessons learnt from different partner cities. Below are some local actions, lessons learnt and outputs.
Turning warning signs into action
In Fleurus, a small Belgian city in Cities@Heart, commercial vacancies in the centre had been growing for years. Instead of accepting vacancy as an inevitable symptom of decline, the city decided to actively intervene with a support programme offering shopkeepers guidance, mentoring and EUR 3 000 grants for new businesses. Participation jumped from 10 shops in 2024 to 45 by the end of 2025. The programme shifted the city from passive observer to active market enabler, before the centre reached a point of no return.
In Braga (PT), the Cities After Dark lead partner, night-time issues were traditionally treated as problems of enforcement – noise, safety, regulation – with limited stakeholder involvement and no shared vision for what the night could be. Through the network, the city co-created a long-term night-time strategy with local stakeholders, shifting from reactive management to an integrated approach. That shift produced results no one had anticipated. The city launched a festival showcasing its night-time cultural scene, but it also led to entirely new services, including a night nursery for families where both parents work night shifts near the local hospital and university.
In C4TALENT, two cities arrived at similar conclusions through very different paths. In Alytus (LT), the answer to brain drain was not a promotional campaign. It was building the entrepreneurial ecosystem that would give young people a reason to stay or return, starting with a regional innovation hub (Alytus Hub) as a concrete anchor for startup development and remote work. In Varberg (SE), the approach was different, but the logic was the same, rather than promising an innovation district in the abstract, the city organised a three-day hackathon where tech professionals and university students tackled a real problem for a real local company. The exercise produced practical ideas for new digital services, while helping connect students, employers and the city’s emerging innovation ecosystem.
The governance shift nobody budgets for
Across every network, the same pattern kept surfacing: the most lasting results were not coming from individual projects but from changes in how cities organise themselves. Cities@Heart found that city centres were declining partly because no single department owned the problem. Mobility, commerce, housing, heritage and culture were all managed separately, with no shared framework for the centre as a whole. In Cesena (IT), the response was to build ‘Co-planning Tables’ – internal coordination structures that forced departments to work from shared data for the first time. In Portugal, the five municipalities of the Pentágono Urbano association went even further, establishing a permanent joint Competence Centre for Urban Innovation, replacing fragmented decision-making with a collective governance model.
Remote-IT partner Tartu (EE) focused on organisational change for hybrid work in city administration. The city's Hybrid Work Action Plan addresses this through 11 integrated actions, from organisation-wide guidelines and a training platform to a Telework Ambassadors programme that after testing revealed that even when employees were willing to engage, the institutional frameworks around data protection, feedback systems and cybersecurity were not yet in place. In Murcia (ES), the turning point came when the city stopped treating its €8 million Audiovisual Hub as an expensive high-tech facility and started treating it as remote work infrastructure, connecting hybrid work policy, worker attraction and urban regeneration into a single cross-departmental strategy for the first time.
TechDiversity saw the same governance gap. Arezzo (IT) developed a city-level governance framework, a steering committee, working groups and a monitoring structure, to coordinate the transition of vulnerable students and NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, Training) into tech careers. In Bucharest (RO), a new District Skills Council brought together schools, universities, employers and the local administration around a shared skills agenda for the first time.
When testing changes the plan
Not every city found the right answer on the first attempt, or as planned, and required local input and flexibility. Brindisi (IT) designed and promoted a one-month stay package for digital nomads in spring 2025. Online interest was strong. The number of confirmed arrivals was zero. Rather than burying the result, Brindisi turned it into the foundation of a more honest strategic conversation. The city's entire approach shifted from attraction through marketing to ecosystem readiness and real value.
Within TechDiversity, Bielsko-Biała (PL) created a new standalone programme to address women’s under-representation in local tech. More specifically, the city embedded a pilot, Her Story in Tech, directly inside the BBDays4.IT festival – an event that already existed, already had an audience. The proof of concept opened the door to something broader: a Diversity and Inclusion dashboard, inclusive co-working, micro-seed fund and mentoring. The lesson: work with what exists rather than against institutional inertia.
In Saint-Quentin (FR), within the Residents of the Future network, the most effective method for understanding what new residents actually needed was not a formal consultation. An informal gathering – hosted by residents themselves – was enough to foster trust among the people. Those insights directly shaped the city's welcoming programme.
Lessons that transfer beyond these networks
Six networks, two years of structured peer learning across more than 50 cities. What resonates beyond the experiences of the cities that took part?
- Early warning requires deliberate attention. Demographic shifts, vacancy trends, exclusion patterns, night-time dynamics: all of these are observable well before they become structural crises. The most effective actions treat early signals as policy relevant, rather than waiting for indicators to confirm what residents could already sense. The question is whether a city's governance is tuned to notice them.
- People-centred framing changes what solutions look like. Every network found that redefining local economic development around the everyday lives of residents, rather than around growth metrics or promotional campaigns, opened up a different set of responses.
- Testing before scaling is risk management, not methodology. The URBACT Method asks cities to test ideas at small scale before committing to full implementation. Cities that built in experiments, even when those experiments failed, arrived at implementation with better evidence, stronger stakeholder buy-in and more realistic plans.
Governance transformation is the intervention most cities underestimate and most need. Integrated action plans require integrated governance. That is harder, slower and less visible than a new programme or a new building. It is also what determines whether a project becomes a one-off or a lasting policy shift.
Discover more local actions from URBACT cities
The challenges described in this article are not unique to the 53 cities involved in the featured URBACT Action Planning Networks. Talent is fleeing from small and medium-sized towns across Europe. City centres are losing their everyday function. Night-time economies are managed through regulation rather than strategy. Local tech sectors exclude the people they most need. Remote work is reshaping where and how people live and most cities are still watching from the side-lines.
The difference between a city that responds in time and one that does not is rarely about resources or size. It is about whether a city is willing to take seriously what it can already sense, even before the data catches up. Every month of inaction narrows the range of possible responses.
The tools, methods and lessons from these six networks are freely available precisely because the challenge is shared. They will not solve any city's problems on their own. But they can help a city start asking the right questions earlier and that, as these sixty cities learned, is where everything begins.
Explore the following results from the Action Planning Networks featured in this article:
C4TALENT — Core Network Publication - your starting point for navigating C4TALENT's learning offer, including practical guides and video lessons on entrepreneurial ecosystems, talent attraction and place branding.
Cities@Heart — Cities@Heart Playbook and Cities@Heart Toolkit: 10 tested tools for downtown revitalisation
Cities After Dark — Handbook: Cities After Dark in 10 Steps
Residents of the Future — IAP Package and Podcast on demographic change and population resilience
Remote-IT — Digital Playbook - Remote and Hybrid Work for Thriving Cities
TechDiversity — E-Booklet and Case Library on inclusive tech and digital ecosystems
Cities interested in taking this work further can now join the next generation of URBACT networks! The new URBACT call for Action Networks is open until 17 June 2026.
*Here is an overview of the lead and partner cities for each network:
C4TALENT includes the cities and partners of Nyíregyháza City with County Rights (HU) (lead partner), Rzeszów (PL), Alytus (LT), Pula (HR), Alghero Foundation Museum Events Tourism Arts (IT), Piraeus (GR), Roeselare (BE), Vilanova i la Geltrú (ES), Varberg (SE) and Centar Sarajevo (BA).
Cities@Heart includes the cities and partners of Métropole du Grand Paris (FR) (lead partner), Kraków Metropolis Association (PL), Granada (ES), Osijek (HR), Associação de Municípios de Fins Específicos Quadrilátero Urbano (PT), JZ Socio Celje (SI), Sligo (IE), Cesena (IT), Fleurus (BE) and Lamia (GR).
Cities After Dark includes the cities of Braga (PT) (lead partner), Varna (BG), Zadar (HR), Málaga (ES), Tallinn (EE), Nicosia (CY), Paris (FR), Genoa (IT), Budva (ME) and Piraeus (GR).
Residents of the Future includes the cities of Šibenik (HR) (lead partner), Alba Iulia (RO), Iisalmi (FI), Mangualde (PT), Mantova (IT), Plasencia (ES), Saint-Quentin (FR), Saldus (LV) and Trebinje (BA).
Remote-IT includes the cities and partners of Dubrovnik Development Agency (HR) (lead partner), Brindisi (IT), Bucharest 6th District (RO), Câmara de Lobos (PT), Heraklion (GR), Murcia (ES), Tartu (EE) and Tirana (AL).
TechDiversity includes the cities and partners of Trikala (GR) (lead partner), Amarante (PT), Arezzo (IT), Bucharest 6th District (RO), Bielsko-Biała (PL), Guía de Isora (ES), Idrija (SI), Larnaca (CY) and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (GR).