Objectives
Urban Planning for Social Resilience in Urban Neighborhoods. Transformative Change through Civic Engagement (UPRUN) explored how urban planning, civic engagement and social innovation can contribute to more resilient, inclusive and sustainable neighbourhoods.
Across many European cities, civil society actors are increasingly shaping public spaces and co-producing their neighbourhoods. In experimental urban spaces, local initiatives, community groups and “city makers” develop new practices, test social innovations and respond to challenges such as fragmentation, exclusion and uncertainty. UPRUN investigated how these forms of civic engagement can strengthen neighbourhood resilience and what role urban planning and built environment professionals can play in supporting such transformative processes.
Key Factors Shaping Neighbourhood Resilience
Based on a European online survey with 586 valid responses, UPRUN examined which factors strengthen or weaken the perceived resilience of neighbourhoods. The results show that, from the perspective of many respondents, resilient neighbourhoods are shaped above all by collective action, social cohesion, safe and inclusive public spaces, and high environmental quality. Environmental quality, perceived safety, and community cohesion emerged as particularly important positive influences on perceived resilience. At the same time, the findings revealed that many neighbourhoods still face limited opportunities for participation, a lack of meeting places, insufficient information, and weak involvement of residents in planning processes.
UPRUN therefore identified several enabling factors for resilient neighbourhoods: active community engagement processes, transparent cooperation with municipal authorities, accessible green and meeting spaces, social inclusion, safety, and a strong local identity shaped by cultural, historical, and natural landmarks. Key hindering factors include a lack of information, limited citizen participation, social conflicts, unequal access to infrastructure and resources, administrative barriers, weak local organisational structures, and environmental and climate-related risks. The research thus highlights that neighbourhood resilience does not emerge solely through physical or technical measures, but through the interaction of planning, social infrastructure, local networks, cultural identity, and meaningful opportunities for co-creation.
Comparative Insights from the UPRUN Case Studies
Across 32 case studies in diverse European contexts, UPRUN explored how civic engagement, participatory planning, and social innovation contribute to neighbourhood resilience. The cases cover a broad range of urban situations, including streets, squares, housing estates, public markets, community gardens, former industrial sites, cooperative housing projects, historic centres, small towns, and rural heritage landscapes. They address environmental, social, cultural, economic, and institutional challenges, ranging from the defence of green spaces and public commons to climate and energy transitions, active mobility, heritage revitalization, social integration, and local economic development.
A key finding is that civic engagement often emerges where formal planning, market actors, or public institutions are perceived as insufficient in responding to local needs. In some cases, residents mobilized defensively against land sales, infrastructure projects, privatization, or the loss of green and culturally meaningful spaces. In others, civic actors acted proactively by transforming vacant buildings, underused plots, courtyards, or public spaces into community hubs, gardens, cultural venues, mobility initiatives, or social-economy platforms. Together, the cases show that civic engagement is both reactive and generative: it protects existing qualities while also producing new spaces, networks, and futures.
The case studies demonstrate that public and green spaces are central arenas of social resilience. They are not only physical amenities, but also places where residents meet, negotiate, learn, organize, care for their environment, and build a shared sense of belonging. Community gardens, park initiatives, tactical urbanism projects, cultural festivals, street experiments, and adaptive reuse projects all show how spatial interventions can strengthen social ties and collective responsibility.
The comparison also shows that co-production exists on a broad spectrum. In some cases, participation took the form of consultation, workshops, online comments, or participatory budgeting. In others, residents and civic actors co-designed spaces, managed community infrastructure, organized public programmes, or participated in formal decision-making bodies. The strongest forms of co-production emerged where civic input had real consequences for decisions, spatial design, and long-term governance.
Governance is therefore a key condition for transforming participation into resilience. The case studies show a wide range of governance models, from informal assemblies and self-managed commons to municipal participation processes, intermediary-led networks, cooperative ownership models, and formal public-civic partnerships. These arrangements differ in their degree of institutionalization, but they all raise similar questions: Who has access to decision-making? How are responsibilities shared? How is local knowledge integrated into planning? And how can public institutions support civic initiatives without weakening their autonomy?
The role of public authorities varies considerably across the cases. Some municipalities and public agencies acted as enabling partners by providing access, recognition, or institutional support. Other cases show more passive, fragmented, or conflictual relationships, where community proposals remained weakly connected to formal planning procedures. The findings therefore underline that civic engagement becomes more transformative when public institutions create stable channels for cooperation and are willing to share responsibility with local actors. Intermediary actors play a crucial role in many of the cases. Community organizations, universities, NGOs, social enterprises, foundations, and development companies often translate between residents, administrations, experts, and planning systems. These intermediaries can make participation more effective by connecting local knowledge with technical expertise and institutional procedures.
Overall, the UPRUN case studies show that social resilience is not a fixed condition, but an evolving capacity built through trust, solidarity, shared responsibility, and collective learning. Resilience grows when residents have repeated opportunities to act together, shape their environment, and experience that their engagement matters. For urban planning, this means moving beyond one-off participation formats towards long-term frameworks for cooperation, conflict mediation, stewardship, and genuine co-creation.
LearningUPRUN
UPRUN translates its research findings into education and professional practice by supporting a shift from teaching about participation to teaching through participation. The project shows that future planners need skills in facilitation, community mapping, co-design, tactical urbanism, conflict mediation, participatory governance, and reflective practice to address the complex challenges of resilient neighbourhood development.
Based on these insights, UPRUN developed a digital, interactive knowledge and learning platform with hybrid teaching modules, studios, workshops, and methodological resources. These materials help students, educators, and professionals understand neighbourhood resilience and develop planning and design approaches that foster collective action, social innovation, democratic participation, and sustainable urban transformation. The platform also supports users in critically reflecting on common shortcomings in planning and design, such as approaches that treat neighbourhoods only as geographical units, overlook local knowledge and social relations, or remain disconnected from everyday lived experiences and local governance practices.
At the heart of LearningUPRUN are learning units that help future planners understand how local actors identify community needs, activate neighbourhood assets, and transform them into improved social spaces, practices, and planning ideas. By exploring the tools, methods, and organisational approaches used by civic initiatives, the platform supports planners in connecting formal planning processes with community-based action. Two capacities are particularly important in this regard: empathy and critical thinking. Empathy helps planners remain attentive to experiences and needs on the ground, while critical thinking enables them to identify gaps in formal planning approaches and develop strategies for integrating institutional planning with informal and community-driven practices. In this way, LearningUPRUN helps prepare planners and built-environment professionals to support more inclusive, responsive, and resilient neighbourhoods.