UP2030 - Urban Planning and Design ready for 2030
Co-Designing Climate Neutrality, Resilience and Just Transition Visions and Adaptive Pathways with 10 European Cities
Region
Europe and Northern America
Date
2023-2026
Service
Studies, Research, and Capacity Building
Project Details
Location
- Belfast (United Kingdom)
- Rotterdam (Netherlands)
- Münster (Germany)
- Granollers (Spain)
- Lisbon (Portugal)
- Zagreb (Croatia)
- Budapest (Hungary)
- Budapest (Turkey)
- Milan (Italy)
- Thessaloniki (Greece)
Type
- Commission
- Research
Team
Client
Partners
- Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering
- adelphi
- Design Clips
- Green Adapt
- GGGI - Global Green Growth Institute
- ICATALIST
- ISOCARP Institute
- Technische Universiteit Delft
- Lisboa E-Nova
- UIC (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya)
- Aquatec
- Cetaqua
- Law and Internet Foundation
- National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC)
- ODTÜ-GÜNAM
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- University of Stuttgart
- ETH Zürich. The Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture (CEA)
- University of Cambridge. Department of Engineering
- ICLEI
- Resilient Cities Network
- The Urban Climate Change Research Network
- Maggioli
- Vesela Motika
- LINKS Foundation
- K3Y
- Dreven
- Draxis
- Deltares
- Circe
- Buro Happold
- UPV (Universitat Politècnica de València)
- Mapping for Change
What is it About?
UP2030 is a Horizon Europe-funded project that aims to support cities in their transition towards climate neutrality by leveraging urban planning and digital tools. The methods and approaches developed by projects partners are applied and tested through 10 selected pilot cities - Belfast, Budapest, Granollers, Istanbul, Lisbon, Milan, Münster, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, and Zagreb - and later prepared to be replicated across Europe.
In response to mounting climate pressures and socio-economic shifts, the project brings together municipalities, researchers, designers, and local communities together, forming a consortium of 47 partners, to co-develop forward-thinking solutions that promote more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban environments.
Blending Engagement, Reserach and Digital Innovation
At the heart of UP2030 lies a commitment to leveraging urban planning and design as catalysts for deep socio-technical transitions. The project enables cities to move from climate commitments to concrete actions through tailored, city-specific interventions. These are grounded in a robust methodological framework — the innovative 5UP-approach — which integrates digital tools with practical and participatory methods. This approach helps cities navigate complexity, align strategies with local governance and resources, and embed climate neutrality in both strategic decisions and everyday practices.
Inclusive participation is fundamental across all stages of the project. By engaging communities early and often, UP2030 ensures that interventions reflect real needs, deliver multiple co-benefits, and maximise spatial justice. Citizens are not just consulted — they are empowered as agents of change, encouraged to adopt sustainable behaviours and shape their own urban futures.
Prototyping at the Neighbourhood Scale, Upscaling to the Citywide
Neighbourhoods are the key scale of intervention. They provide an accessible ground for testing ideas, piloting climate innovations, and demonstrating tangible benefits — from improved liveability to environmental performance. Lessons learned at the neighbourhood level will inform scalable, city-wide transformations.
Yet, achieving meaningful impact demands more than good design. UP2030 supports cities in creating the conditions for systemic change: developing enabling policy frameworks, building institutional capacity, rethinking governance structures, unlocking financing mechanisms, and embedding sustainability into the urban DNA. Through this comprehensive, multi-stakeholder approach, UP2030 equips cities to deliver across four core values: equity, resilience, climate neutrality, and long-term sustainability.
TSPA’s Role in UP2030
TSPA led the co-design of visions and adaptive pathways to achieve climate neutrality, resilience, and just transition goals for pilot neighbourhoods across Europe. Our core contribution was the development of a flexible, replicable methodology, guiding participating cities through participatory processes that turn ambitious goals into actionable and context-sensitive strategies.
European cities face the dual challenge of meeting climate action goals while fostering urban resilience and ensuring a just transition for all. This project addressed that challenge by placing city stakeholders—their needs, ideas, and local knowledge—at the core of the process.
TSPA developed a flexible and replicable methodology grounded in systems thinking and urban planning practice. This approach enabled cities to co-design future visions and translate them into context-specific, actionable strategies.
To support municipalities, we worked closely with project partners to create a comprehensive co-design toolkit. The toolkit includes a step-by-step guidance and set of workshop templates tailored to a variety of engagement formats. It is designed to help city administrations facilitate inclusive, productive dialogue among public officials, businesses, civil society, and residents around climate action and shared urban futures.
To further strengthen municipal capacity of participating cities, our team led a series of targeted activities that built understanding, fostered collaboration, and equipped city staff with practical tools. These iterative, hands-on consultations included capacity building sessions, and consultations to further tailor the process to the specific pilot city needs.
By integrating these processes, cities were able to build shared ownership of their climate goals and make informed choices that balance trade-offs on the path toward climate neutrality and resilience.
Key Takeaways
As UP2030 approaches the end of its three-year journey, cities are now at the finish line, finalising implementation of their prototype projects and beginning to shape guidelines for future UP-scaling. And while the co-visioning and pathway development phase was only one of the four project phases, it laid a strong foundation for pilot implementation. This process enabled cities to align on shared objectives for climate neutrality, resilience, and a just transition, while fostering a collective understanding of what these goals mean in each urban context.
One of the most critical insights from this work is that climate action cannot be driven solely by top-down policies or technical tools. It must be grounded in participatory processes. The co-design process opened space for inclusive dialogue and helped to build stakeholder ownership. At the same time it revealed the complexity of discussing climate resilience and carbon neutrality with diverse stakeholder groups—from young people to the elderly, and from local teachers to technical experts.
While challenging, these dialogues proved indispensable. They built awareness, clarified priorities, and created a common language across different communities. We believe, that this shared understanding is the real catalyst for transformative change. From here, cities can take meaningful next steps—such as combining digital tools with spatial strategies—to operationalise their visions and achieve their climate goals.
UP2030 offers a new model for urban transition—one that centers the knowledge, agency, and aspirations of cities and their people.
