What if the future of our cities depended not only on how we design buildings and infrastructures, but also on how we organise our lives together?
Cities are often presented as the places where the challenges of our time become most visible: climate change, inequality, housing insecurity and environmental degradation. Yet they are also spaces where people can collectively develop new ways of living, producing, sharing and caring. On World Cities Day, celebrated on 31 October, we are invited to look beyond the challenges and explore the transformative potential of urban life.
A recent scientific article (Escario-Chust; et al. 2025) published in Cities highlights the importance of creating new forms of urban governance to accelerate sustainability transitions. The research explores how collaborative spaces, known as Transition Arenas, can bring together citizens, public institutions, researchers and other actors to develop shared visions and experiment with new solutions.
The central idea is that urban transformation cannot be achieved through technological innovation alone. While renewable energy, efficient buildings and green infrastructures are essential, lasting change also requires co-creation, transforming the social relationships, decision-making processes and institutional structures that shape urban life.
This means rethinking who participates in the decisions that affect our neighbourhoods, how public spaces are managed, and how cities can support initiatives that prioritise collective well-being over individual consumption.
Across the world, community-led initiatives are already exploring these alternatives. Urban gardens can become spaces for ecological learning and collective action. Cooperative housing projects can challenge conventional models of property and access to housing. Community energy initiatives can enable citizens to participate in the energy transition. These experiences demonstrate that cities can become laboratories for social transformations, where people develop new capacities to act together.
However, these initiatives do not automatically generate systemic change. Their transformative potential depends on whether they can influence institutions, challenge existing inequalities and connect with broader social and political processes.
This raises a fundamental question: how can we transform cities in ways that also transform the societies we live in?
The answer requires more than making cities greener or more efficient. It calls for creating opportunities for people to participate in shaping their collective future, strengthening democratic decision-making and ensuring that the benefits of urban transformation are shared.
World Cities Day is an opportunity to imagine cities not simply as infrastructures to be managed, but as collective spaces where more sustainable, inclusive and democratic ways of living can emerge.
Because transforming our cities is not only about changing the places where we live. It is about changing how we live together.
Scientific reference: Escario-Chust, A., Vogelzang, F., Palau-Salvador, G., & Segura-Calero, S. (2025). Rewiring Co-creation: Towards Transition Arenas with Urban Transformative Capacity. Cities, 158, 105589. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.105589
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Barcelona