Reframing our current approach to urban transformations

Unprecedented, interconnected and complex challenges can no longer be diagnosed in isolation. This requires us to shift the scale, pace and very concept of innovation in cities.

Climate change is a matter of extreme urgency that can no longer be remedied by gradual and incremental changes. But an environmental discourse purely focused on risks, limits and constraints will not attract enough traction, nor is it productive to insist on complex interconnections without showing practical, engaging steps towards addressing them.

Instead, we must build a discourse of change that is as inclusive as it is systemic. We need to build fertile ground for a deeply collaborative, opportunistic, multi-actor modality of change, rooted in genuinely motivating stories in sync with the grain of people’s everyday lives and aspirations. In short, we must reframe our current way of thinking about city transformations.

We have gathered the outputs and lessons-learned from a community workshop in Malaga, which saw more than 100 city leaders and teams from all across Europe come together to present the real challenges that they are facing in their cities and find new ways to support the systemic transition towards inclusive and sustainable futures.

Sean Lockie, Director, Urban Transitions at EIT Climate-KIC talking about the reframing exercise for cities at the workshop in Malaga.

Indy Johar, Dark Matter Labs, helped the city representatives rethink and reframe their current approaches to solve their challenges and gain more impact from their projects.

Francisco de la Torre Prados, Mayor of Malaga, shares his thoughts about the outcomes of workshop and Malaga’s own plans for reframing their urban challenges.

Züleyxa Izmailova, Deputy Mayor of Tallinn, highlights the current challenges for Tallinn and the importance for people to connect in order to make change happen.

Download the workshop insights from the cities:

Next steps

To truly enable city transformation at scale, we need to completely rewire our approach to urban innovation and implementation.

To face this new reality, EIT Climate-KIC’s Urban Transitions is playing a role as a strategic facilitator for systemic innovation in whole value chains, applying leverage through finance, skills, and technology to influence behaviour, policy, governance, and market structures, so as to catalyse deep decarbonisation and climate resilience in European societies. It helps its community influence intermediary drivers by offering grants to go where others won’t, convening coalitions of stakeholders, educating key target groups, creating platforms for knowledge exchange and engaging with policymakers and business leaders.

For more information, please contact us.

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