News of European City Centers

You probably already know the “15 minutes city”. Highlighted by Paris, the concept aims to design the city in order to meet all the basic needs within a 15-minute radius on foot or by bike. But the swedes came to the even more local concept: the One-minute city! The ambition of the concept is to focus on single streets and…

In the old days, prisons were commonly located close to the city centers. Nowadays, the closure of these outdated places creates new challenges and opportunities for the municipalities. Most of them are demolished to make space for modern buildings, but some historical architectures deserve preservation.  It is the case for the Lukiškės Prison in Vilnius, which tells a rich and…

In Santiago de Compostela, the municipality created a unique way to encourage its citizens to have sustainable and environmentally friendly behavior: by giving them rewards! The program is called Tropa Verde (“green troops” in English) and fights the biggest barrier against recycling, which is habits. The principle of Tropa Verde is simple: as a citizen, you deliver your recyclable waste to…

For a long time, the capital of Estonia was quite an important industrial hub of the Baltics. Since the 1990s, the country’s economy radically switched to the third sector, especially betting on Tech, innovation, and tourism. This successful turn is now visible in Tallinn’s landscape. Let’s look at two former industrial neighborhoods that radically transformed into trendy and creative spaces….

A couple of weeks ago, we presented Kaunas in Lithuania as the European Capital of Culture 2022, but another city shares the title: Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxemburg. The second-largest city in the country aims to renew its industrial heritage and culture with more than 160 cultural projects. The keyword here is Remix! This keyword reflects the will to reinvent the local…

Located between the German Alps and the Schönbuch nature park, Tübingen is a city whose strong commitment to the environment allows the development of alternative lifestyles.  According to the magazine Géo, Tübingen is “the most vegan-friendly city in Europe”. Indeed, the important share of vegetarian and vegan inhabitants pushes the shopkeepers to adapt to the demand (the creation of vegetarian…

Today, it is rare to witness the opening of a new park inside the dense urban area of a European capital. It is even more unusual when it hosts exceptionally diverse and almost untouched wildlife. This park exists and it is called the Văcăreşti Park. A bit of history: It was first born as a construction project launched by the…

The capital city of Latvia faced real challenges in the last decades that changed its economy, morphology, and identity. After 2008, many vast spaces remained vacant because of the disappearance of former economic activities. In the meantime, the local artistic and cultural scene was booming and needed space to blossom. From that point, a citizen initiative emerged to highlight this…

Antwerp is not located under the tropics but it will suffer more than other cities from heat-waves in the future. This is due to the “urban heat islands”. This phenomenon implies higher temperatures in urban environments than in their rural surroundings. The denser and more mineral the city is, stronger is the phenomenon. This makes Antwerp’s city center especially vulnerable…

As the first snowflakes appear, most european cyclists have to return to other modes of transportation, contrary to the cyclists of Oulu in Finland. For them, it is just another day of cycling along the arctic polar circle. During the cold (with minimal under -30°c), dark and snowy winters 12% of all trips made in Oulu are by bike. By…