In 2025, four URBACT Action Planning Networks – One Health 4 Cities, U.R. Impact, NextGen YouthWork, and Cities@Heart – teamed up to explore how cities can make smarter, more impactful use of social data in local policy design. This joint journey within the URBACT Knowledge Hub on Data is now culminating in a series of four webinars, which are open to the wider public.
The ultimate goal of the webinar series is to share experience and knowledge around the use of social data and jointly draw conclusions and develop recommendations on how social data can make better cities.
The networks started their journey with a survey to better understand how URBACT cities are using social data in their local work, what tools and methods are already in place, and where support is still needed – from collection and management to analysis and evaluation of social data.
Based on these findings, the URBACT Secretariat and city partners designed a webinar series to discuss how social data can improve urban policies. They will share examples from local practices and their cooperation in the URBACT networks and will also invite other cities and partners into the discussion.
The results of the webinars will be summarised in a guide on social-data driven urban policies, as part of a joint creative process, so stay tuned for more to come!
What do EU cities really know? Social data needs, challenges and turning them into policy
Thursday, 15/01/2026, 10:00-11:3
The first webinar will look into what type of social data cities actually collect, and what is missing.
How to collect and manage data for social policies?
Thursday, 22/01/2026, 10:00-11:30
The second webinar will focus on how cities collect and manage the data, whether they are collected and organised systematically, or in rather fragmented processes, and whether they are collected with consistent methods and clear responsibilities.
How to interact and draft social policies with data?
Thursday, 29/01/2026, 10:00-11:30
In the third webinar, cities will exchange on how social data can be used best to identify priorities and to interact with stakeholders, as they realised that evidence needs to be translated into targeted and actionable insights in order to convince and tell a story.
How to measure the impact of social policies with data?
Thursday, 19/02/2026, 10:00-11:30
The last webinar will shed a light on how cities are using social data to measure the impact of local policies and to show the results to the public or to decision-makers, so that they can see and understand what has actually changed – or not, for better or for worse.
“Measuring social impact is like checking if your city’s love letters actually reached the citizens.”
