Project period: June 2026 – December 2028 · Ongoing
Across the Baltic Sea Region, cities are facing mounting pressures. From the urgent realities of climate change to the need for stronger social cohesion. To tackle these shared challenges, Nordic Edge is proud to announce our participation in the newly launched Future Cities Platform.
This initiative is part of a much larger collaborative effort across the continent. The EU Interreg Baltic Sea Region program funds cross-border innovation, water management, and climate-neutral development to make the Baltic region more resilient, sustainable, and economically integrated.
Many local governments want to work in more creative and people-centered ways, but they often lack the practical methods or resources to do so. The Future Cities project aims to bridge this gap. By combining the most successful tools from past European projects, the platform will use culture, creativity, and design to improve local neighborhoods and boost urban resilience.
The core goals of the project include developing a practical "Future Cities Playbook" for local authorities, creating online peer-learning communities, and delivering policy briefs that show why investing in culture and creativity is a strategic move for liveable cities.
Within this international consortium, Nordic Edge brings our core strengths to the table: expertise in public-private collaboration, agile piloting, and mobilizing city networks.
Our primary role is to ensure the project doesn't operate in silos. We are leading the effort to connect the Future Cities platform with major European initiatives, such as the New European Bauhaus (NEB) and NetZeroCities. We are injecting proven, design-driven innovation methods drawn directly from our successful work with NEB-STAR and the Norwegian GNIST programme, into the Future Cities Playbook to help municipalities move faster from idea to implementation.
Because no single city can solve these complex societal challenges alone, transnational cooperation is essential. By getting together expertise across borders, we can refine tools that work in a variety of local realities.
Alongside Nordic Edge representing Norway, the project unites eight expert organizations across seven countries:
By connecting diverse cities and making proven methods easy to use, we are turning co-creation into an everyday tool for shaping better, more liveable cities across Northern Europe.