Cities across Europe face the dual challenge of meeting climate action goals while ensuring a just transition and improving urban resilience. How we plan, adapt, and act at the neighbourhood level will shape not only CO2 emissions but also the quality of life for communities. This is the driving force behind UP2030, a Horizon-Europe project supporting cities in reaching their carbon neutrality goals.
TSPA led the development of UP2030's co-design methodology, a structured yet flexible process to help cities shape shared visions for carbon-neutral, just, and resilient neighbourhoods. The methodology enables local governments and communities to co-create both the what of the future vision and the how, using adaptive pathways that connect long-term goals with actionable steps.
Making visioning a tool for change
The demand for neighbourhood, city, or regional climate-neutral visions has grown in recent years. These visions are tools for addressing complex challenges through inclusive, forward-looking urban planning. While many cities already have climate targets and strategies, what is often missing is a set of actionable, locally grounded plans that are inclusive and adaptable. The co-design methodology developed within UP2030 responds directly to this need. It provides a step-by-step roadmap for defining local ambitions, aligning them with existing policies, identifying governance barriers, and translating aspirations into action. The methodology follows clear milestones: from objective setting and spatial assessments to pilot visions and adaptive pathways.
Designing with – not for
At the heart of the methodology lies co-design. Cities are not implementers of external plans, but rather partners in shaping their transitions. The process centers on engaging local governments, community members, researchers, and techical experts.
To support this, TSPA and Mapping for Change developed an engagement toolkit that includes brainstorming sessions, participatory mapping, and scenario-building exercises.
Across our work in UP2030 and other projects, we've seen the role of urban planning shift, from a technical discipline to a facilitative process. Planners are increasingly called upon to enable transformation by fostering participation and translating discussion into spatial outcomes. In our pilot cities, the need was not for a masterplan, but rather a flexible framework that brings fragmented efforts together and defines shared pathways to implementation.
The methodology is not prescriptive but rather modular and can be adapted to different urban realities. Cities have the ability to align their local contexts, an approach that proved essential in the diverse environment of the UP2030 pilots.
From paper to practice
The methodology has now been applied in cities including Rotterdam, Milan, Granollers, Münster, and others, each with its own process and outcomes.
In Belfast, co-design shaped a replicable model for transitioning business districts toward net-zero. The Linen Quarter is set to become Northern Ireland's first sustinable business district, integrating tree planting, green infrastructure, and sustainable mobility.
In Budapest, workshops explored how the Healthy Streets Methodology can infrom planning throughout the city.
The adaptive pathways appraoch, orginally used in water management, is gaining traction in urban climate planning. Its strength lie in flexibility. Rather than a linear process, the Granollers model defines multiple trajectories, action clusters, and decision points that allow for adaptation as conditions change.
Each city developed its own adaptive pathways to achieve its vision, anticipating challenges from political shifts to financial constraints. These are not fixed plans, but living documents, flexible enough to evolve over time and robust enough to guide action.
What comes next?
As cities move toward prototyping and implementation, the co-created visions and pathways will serve as reference points. Designed for iteration, they support cities in managing uncertainty while remaining focused on long-term goals.
The UP2030 process also created space for cities to share obstacles and solutions, building a collective understanding of what carbon neutrality, resilience, and just tradition mean in different urban contexts.
More broadly, UP2030 proposes a new model for urban transformation, one that centres the knowledge, agency, and aspirations of cities and their communities.
