Repurposing and reshaping of city infrastructure; a sustainable re-use for citizens and important target audience groups for the future of our cities

Our network is a coming together of European New Towns who investigate the spatial and social transformations undergoing in these specific contexts. All the new Towns represented in the network share a substantial modernist development dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Our cities are relatively young in design and infrastructure, built on a utopian ideal of creating better lives for people and grown from planned migration from larger cities. In city timescales we are only just reaching maturity and we face today similar challenges and we want to explore together possible tools and policy action to tackle them. As New Towns, our urban infrastructure and public realm is now in danger of it all failing at the same time. The percentage under threat is much higher than a traditional city, threatening a critical imbalance which will lead to large parts of our cities unused and undesired reducing the quality of life for our residents in the process. Our livable cities are under pressure from rapid urbanization and incoming global diversity on a scale not seen before and which threatens significant social change and upheaval. This project has the ambition to co-design an integrated Policy and Action Plan to help our cities to reinvent themselves from the post-war utopian, homogeneous, New Town ideal, by creating a new relationship with its citizens and with those nearby larger cities which once again are looking to us to solve their own population increases.