Cities across Europe face the dual challenge of meeting climate action goals while fostering urban resilience and ensuring a just transition for all. How we plan, adapt, and act at the neighbourhood level will shape not just CO2 emissions trajectories, but also the quality of life for communities. This is the core motivation behind UP2030, a Horizon Europe project supporting cities in reaching their carbon neutrality goals.
TSPA, a Berlin-based urban planning and design firm, led the development of UP2030’s co-design methodology- a structured yet flexible process to support cities in shaping shared visions for carbon-neutral, just, and resilient neighbourhoods. The approach enables local governments and communities to co-create not only the what of the future vision, but also the how to achieve it, through adaptive pathways that connect long-term goals with practical action.
Making Visioning a Tool for Change
In recent years, we saw increasing attention for crafting neighbourhood, city, or regional climate-neutral visions. The increasing demand for these spatial visions is driven by the need to address multifaceted challenges through coordinated, inclusive, and forward-looking planning approaches. These visions are essential tools for guiding sustainable development, enhancing territorial cohesion, and fostering resilient communities. But visions are only useful when they can lead to change. Many cities already have climate targets and strategic frameworks in place. What they need are actionable, locally grounded strategies that can be owned by diverse stakeholders - and adapted over time.
The co-design methodology for vision and adaptive pathways developed within UP2030 addresses this challenge directly. It provides cities with a step-by-step roadmap and tailored engagement methods for collaboratively defining ambitions, aligning them with existing policies, identifying governance barriers, and translating aspirations into actions. The methodology is built around a series of clear milestones: from objective validation and spatial assessment, to the formulation of pilot visions, and the development of adaptive pathways.
Figure 1: Process diagram for co-designing urban visions and adaptive pathways towards carbon neutrality, resilience and just transition
Designing with – not for
At the core of this methodology is the principle of co-design. Cities are not seen as implementers of external plans, but as central partners in shaping the transition. Therefore, the process is centred on engaging local governments, community representatives, researchers, and technical experts.
To support this, TSPA, together with Mapping for Change, developed an engagement toolkit of tried and tested methods—ranging from thematic brainstorming and mapping exercises to participatory scenario-building.
Across our work in UP2030 and other international urban development projects, we increasingly see the role of urban planning evolving—from a static, technical discipline toward a more process-oriented practice. In many cases, we see a need for planners to step into the role of facilitator of the transformation process—someone who creates the conditions for meaningful participation, alignment, and translation of discussions into tangible spatial solutions rather than delivering fixed masterplans. This shift has become especially clear through our collaboration with pilot cities: what was needed was not a predefined vision, but a shared framework to align fragmented efforts, reconcile competing interests, and define pathways for implementation.
Importantly, the methodology is not prescriptive. It is modular and adaptive, designed to meet the realities and constraints of different urban contexts. Cities can tailor the process to align with their timeline, resources, and existing initiatives—an approach that has proven essential in the complex environments of the UP2030 pilot areas.
From Paper to Practice
All the project pilot cities, including cities such as Rotterdam, Milan, Granollers or Münster, have now applied the methodology in their contexts. In each, the process unfolded differently.
In Belfast, for example, the co-design process helped to frame a replicable model for redeveloping the business districts towards becoming net-zero, integrating tree planting, green infrastructure, and sustainable mobility through a co-design approach. The framework will be tested in the Linen Quarter district, which has been identified to become the first sustainable and net-zero business district in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, in Budapest, co-visioning workshops focused on integrating the Healthy Streets Methodology into urban planning projects throughout the city. In Milan and Granollers, adaptive pathways were developed through a series of focused dialogues with municipal teams and stakeholders, identifying practical interventions across governance, mobility, finance, and citizen engagement topics.
Figure 2: Vision co-design workshop in Granollers.
While the adaptive pathways approach originally stems from climate change adaptation—particularly in water management—it is increasingly being applied to urban climate planning, where its use remains novel but steadily growing. The approach is especially valuable in addressing the complexity and uncertainty inherent in urban transformation. Large-scale socio-technical climate transitions often face risks of path-dependency, where rigid, step-by-step planning can be vulnerable to external disruptions. However, in the case of Granollers, the adaptive pathways framework is not based on a single, linear trajectory. Instead, it is multilinear, with clearly defined objectives, action clusters, and flexible pathways that allow the city to adapt and implement each action when conditions are most favorable. This structure supports a more resilient and dynamic planning process, better suited to the challenges of long-term urban decarbonization.
Figure 3: Adaptive pathways co-design workshop in Thessaloniki.
In UP2030, we worked together with each of the cities and their stakeholders to build an ‘adaptive pathways’, tailored for achieving neighbourhood visions, which took into account a wide range of potential risks and barriers to execution. These pathways aim to anticipate a number of changes (technical, financial, political, etc.) that could happen over the course of the vision’s implementation and provide more robust and flexible alternative step-by-step routes to achieving their goals.
The result of all this co-creation is not a fixed plan, but a living framework. Each city created its own vision and adaptive pathways—working documents that anchor local climate action in a shared, participatory process. Together, these outputs support the larger UP2030 strategy of Update, Upskill, Upgrade, Upscale, and Uptake.
What comes next?
As cities move to the next phase - prototyping and implementation - the results of the co-visioning process serve as reference points and navigation tools. Designed to allow for iteration and adaptation, the methodology is intended to help cities manage uncertainty while staying focused on long-term goals. At the same time, the process has helped participating cities share common obstacles and ways to overcome them, while building a collective understanding of what climate resilience, carbon neutrality, and just transition ambitions mean in their specific urban contexts.
More broadly, UP2030 offers a new model for urban transformation-one that centers the knowledge, agency, and aspirations of cities and their communities.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This project has received funding from the Horizon Innovation Actions under the grant agreement n° 101096405.