CityHack: Design the city you want

Cities and regions are facing deep structural challenges — climate change, global competition, resource scarcity, social inequalities, and growing territorial fragmentation. Traditional spatial planning approaches, often vertical, standardized and technocratic, have proven inadequate to address these complex and interlinked issues.
Prof. Hamdouch argues that institutional innovation is crucial to reconnect spatial planning and territorial development with today’s realities. Beyond technical or infrastructural change, resilient territories depend on the capacity of institutions and governance systems to evolve, to learn, and to include multiple actors and perspectives.
Institutional innovation means rethinking the “rules of the game” — the way decisions are made, actors cooperate, and citizens participate. It involves moving towards “soft spatial planning”: more flexible, strategic, participatory and collaborative approaches that bridge administrative boundaries and foster collective action.
Drawing on international cases — from Vienna’s Grätzloase and Stockholm’s participatory governance to Porto’s inclusive zoning and Tours’ inter-municipal contracts — Hamdouch illustrates how local and regional initiatives can create new forms of cooperation, social learning, and policy experimentation.
Resilient cities and regions:
build on their specific local resources while remaining open to external inputs;
mobilize public, private and civic actors in shared governance;
encourage bottom-up innovation and cooperation;
and continuously adapt to changing environmental and social conditions.
The keynote concludes that the path to territorial resilience lies in institutional change: renewing governance models, empowering citizens, and promoting cross-scale collaboration for sustainable and inclusive development.
Ana Moreno Monroy’s presentation highlighted how data-driven territorial analysis enables policymakers to better understand and address urban challenges — especially the growing inequalities in housing affordability.
Using OECD’s harmonised definitions of Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) and regional typologies, she showed how comparable data make it possible to analyse and benchmark cities across countries. According to OECD evidence, housing prices in cities are on average 63% higher than in towns and 135% higher than in rural areas, and large FUAs are almost 70% more expensive than small ones.
These findings reveal widening spatial disparities in access to housing and opportunities, calling for coordinated responses across multiple levels of government.
Moreno Monroy emphasised the role of the OECD Local Data Portal and Regions and Cities Database, which provide granular, internationally comparable indicators for more than 225,000 municipalities in 41 countries. These tools empower local and national authorities to monitor inequalities, design targeted interventions, and promote inclusive and resilient cities.
Her concluding message invited participants to use data as a bridge between diagnosis and action, encouraging cross-scale collaboration and citizen engagement in tackling urban affordability and sustainability challenges.
Walter Tortorella illustrated how Italian municipalities finance urban regeneration through a mix of national and European public instruments, complemented in some cases by public–private partnerships.
The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) represents today the main funding source, with over 5 billion euros allocated across three key measures: Urban Regeneration Projects, Integrated Urban Plans (PUIs), and the Innovative Programme for Housing Quality (PinQua).

He showcased concrete examples — from Trento’s new mobility hub to Naples’ cultural reuse of former public buildings — demonstrating the territorial breadth and diversity of these investments.
European Structural Funds, particularly the ERDF, continue to play a complementary role, with dedicated programmes such as PON Metro and Metro Plus and Medium-Sized Cities South.
Tortorella also highlighted major challenges: local governments’ limited borrowing capacity, the shortage of skilled human resources, and administrative burdens that threaten the full use of available funds.