News of European City Centers

The benefits of cycling are now not to be proven: exercise, health, traffic, accessibility for all public, quality of life, or noise. Yet despite the beautiful weather conditions, Portuguese cities can have trouble convincing drivers to trade their cars for a bike. Thus the city of Braga, alongside Istanbul (Turkey) and Tallinn (Estonia), took the opportunity offered by the European…

In the heart of the Cypriot capital city lies a peaceful community garden. The story goes that in October 2019, an energetic team called Gardens of the Future presented their project and won the Climathon Nicosia Concours. This award kickstarted the project to makegarden reality. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, the derelict space soon became a flourishing sustainable…

In Hungary, the transport sector accounts for 20% of CO2 emissions. To tackle this issue on a national level, the National Hydrogen Strategy was adopted last June to push the adoption of this new technology. It encompasses the rapid extension of the production capacities, the creation of 40 filling points, and the purchase of almost 5 000 hydrogen-powered buses and…

Situated 60km away from Dublin, the town of Drogheda has seen in the past years an increase in population, boosted by the Covid pandemic and subsequent move of Dubliners looking for more space. Thus the municipality aims to reconnect the newcomers and already inhabitants to their town through culture. In this framework, officials unveiled the first six murals of the…

Switching their energy supply to renewables is central for municipalities to reach their carbon emissions goals. Being one of the most local green energy makes photovoltaic particularly easy to get city dwellers involved. Thus Dornbirn in Austria (50 000 inhabitants) and Burgas in Bulgaria (200 000 inhabitants) are taking two different but complementary paths to reach their goals. In Dornbirn,…

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 Nowadays, the closure of these outdated places creates new challenges and opportunities for the municipalities.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…