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Repensar os espaços: aprendizagens sobre a criação de espaços nas cidades URBACT

Desde as ruas animadas de Cork (IE) até aos percursos sensoriais em Tavernes de la Valldigna (ES) e à estratégia Smart Village de Vila Boa do Bispo, cinco boas práticas URBACT mostram como as cidades podem transformar espaços comuns em locais que as pessoas reconhecem, utilizam e de que cuidam.

Cities@Heart: What Happens When Ten Cities Decide to Fall Back in Love with Their Downtowns

The network started with a simple yet radical idea: city centres are worth fighting for. Two and a half years later, ten European cities have shown how true that is.

Picture this. A city manager from Slovenia sharing how financial incentives brought new businesses back to a street full of empty shopfronts. An urban planner from Ireland explaining how activating a single public square transformed the economic pulse of an entire downtown. A policy officer from Spain walking the group through years of hard-won regulatory tools to push back against touristification. A team from Greece describing how a participatory process with residents reshaped the future of their central square. 

Different cities, different challenges, different solutions but the same willingness to learn from each other. This is Cities@Heart.

Can you transfer trust?

For more than ten years, Com'ON, a youth participatory budgeting programme from Cluj-Napoca (Romania), has trusted young people with public resources, inviting them to propose ideas, vote for the projects they believe in and turn them into reality. Hundreds of community initiatives later, this principle, tested in Cluj-Napoca, is being taken further through Com’ON City.

RECUP MASTERCLASS on Monitoring & Impact Evaluation: Measuring the Value of Culture

In April 2026, partners of the URBACT RECUP Network gathered online for a dedicated Masterclass on monitoring, evaluation and the communication of cultural impact. The session focused on helping cities better understand, measure and demonstrate the contribution of culture and creativity to urban development. 

Final Hydro-Heritage Cities meeting: Getting ready to kick off

The Network met for last time in Rome concluding its transfer journey and investment plans, while presented in public the future of Hydro-Heritage management. 

SPARK: Rethinking public procurement as engine for local resilience

AUTHOR: Sabina Reichert, LEAD EXPERT FOR URBACT TN SPARK

On paper, the municipality of Kavala (Greece) looks like many other medium-sized European cities. Back in 2018, it had a relatively solid budget, a tourism-driven economy, and a long list of goods and services to buy every year to keep the city running. Yet officials noticed a worrying pattern: local companies were losing public contracts, larger firms from outside the city were winning more tenders, and no one could clearly say how much of the city’s spending was actually supporting the local economy.