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Urbasofia

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URBASOFIA is a town and regional planning company created in October 2011. Come visit - http://www.urbasofia.eu/index.php/en/

URBASOFIA is currently focusing on design, management and implementation of 2014-2020 territorial cooperation, territorial cohesion related instruments and programmes. Specifically, we are designing for:

Initiatives related to Romanian POR, POCU, PNDR
HORIZON 2020
INTERREG Programmes (Europe, Danube, SEE, Adrion)
URBACT and URBAN INNOVATIVE ACTIONS
ENI Black Sea and ENI MED Programmes
Romania Moldova Territorial Cooperation

29/10/2026

🏛️ Exploring Kavala’s cultural heritage through digital storytelling!

As part of the INT-ACT project, activities took place in the historic Panagia neighbourhood of Kavala, focusing on testing and evaluating the INT-ACT demonstrator and further developing the project’s fourth heritage site case study.

🤝 Organised by URBASOFIA in close collaboration with ITML, the activities brought together local community members, associations, and municipal representatives through individual interviews and two focus groups. Participants explored the demonstrator while walking through the city, experiencing how digital storytelling can connect people with places, history, and collective memory.

🎧 Combining personal recollections and stories from former Panagia residents with historical photographs, city images, and animations, the demonstrator offered an immersive journey through the neighbourhood’s past, highlighting the multicultural influences and migration flows that have shaped its identity across different historical periods.

💬 Discussions explored the role of local communities in preserving cultural traditions and transmitting heritage across generations, as well as opportunities to integrate initiatives like INT-ACT into local policies and strategies. Participants also reflected on challenges such as overtourism, population ageing, and residents moving away, and how cultural heritage can support social inclusion, community engagement, and a shared sense of belonging.

🌍 The experience highlighted how participatory approaches and innovative digital tools can help preserve Kavala’s cultural identity, address contemporary societal challenges, and contribute to a more inclusive and sustainable urban future.

29/10/2026

🚀Our new website is live now!✨

We are excited to introduce our brand-new online home! 🎊 A fresh digital space that reflects who we are and what we do.

This launch wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing collaborators: a big thank you to ArtiViStory Collective for creating the graphics and visual elements that bring the website to life, and to voostvision for designing and developing the website itself. 🤝

💻Check it out and let us know what you think!

🔗Visit us at https://urbasofia.eu/

28/10/2026

🏘️ Everything starts — and ends — in the neighbourhood.

At the Emerging Communities Forum in Istanbul, I presented some of the lessons we are learning at URBASOFIA about the regeneration of large housing estates and what it actually takes to build a friendly neighbourhood.

The neighbourhood is where the big ambitions of urban policy become tangible: where we live, walk, commute, go to school, meet our neighbours, experience nature — or notice its absence.

Across Europe, many large housing estates are now 60–70+ years old. They have accumulated several generations of memories and remain home to a significant part of everyday urban life.

They may be ageing physically, but they are not socially obsolete.

Our work through B-CONNECT in Bistrița and FAVORIT+ in Bucharest is allowing us to explore neighbourhood regeneration through a hybrid relationship between NATURE × PEOPLE × TECHNOLOGY — combining greening and NBS, community participation and stewardship, data and monitoring, energy transition and new urban services.

But our main message in Istanbul was that what we transform is only part of the story. How we transform it matters just as much.

It is a pleasure to share these reflections in Istanbul — and to continue learning from the many different urban stories brought together by the Emerging Communities Forum.

22/10/2026

🌱 What if rural innovation started not with what is missing, but with what is already there?

During the Emerging Communities Forum in Istanbul, URBASOFIA organised “Bringing Innovation to Rural Areas: Pathways for Sustainable Competitiveness” — an interactive workshop exploring how rural territories can turn structural, social and territorial challenges into locally rooted opportunities.

Rural areas hold extraordinary natural, cultural, social and human capital. But demographic decline, outmigration, limited services, weak access to finance and fragmented local economies can gradually erode this capital.

Our starting question was therefore simple:
What do we value in rural areas, what are we at risk of losing — and how can we transform those assets into sustainable opportunities?

The workshop introduced the approach behind GENTLE — Unlocking Sustainable Competitiveness through “Gentle Transformation” of Rural Territories. Endlessly grateful for Fan Li’s from .

We explored three pathways: 🌾 productive landscapes and rural economies; ⚡ digital and green transition; and 🤝 social infrastructure and community resilience.

Participants first mapped the knowledge, landscapes, practices, services and relationships they considered valuable. Then we changed perspective: each table became a small rural innovation fund, with €600,000 to distribute and a maximum investment of €60,000 per initiative.

The challenge was not to produce a list of projects. It was to create a portfolio — connecting investments so that they reinforce one another.

One conclusion became particularly clear: the boundaries between our three pathways are blurry — and that is a good thing.

Rural competitiveness requires economic opportunities, environmental stewardship, technology, services, skills and strong communities to work together.

This also points to one of the challenges ahead for GENTLE: how can micro-grants support not just individual initiatives, but a coherent transformation of an entire territory?

A valuable discussion in Istanbul, and plenty of ideas to take forward! 🌱

emergingcommunitiesforum2026

20/10/2026

🌙What happens to the 15-minute city after dark?

On the second day of the Emerging Communities Forum in Istanbul, URBASOFIA organised After Dark: The Night Journey Challenge. It was an interactive workshop on how accessibility, mobility and perceptions of the city change at night.

Irina Alexandra Panait opened the session by introducing NIGHTSCAPES, our newly funded Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) project coordinated by URBASOFIA. Miruna Marin then explained how the workshop would run. Together, with the support of Codruț-Lucian Papina, they took the audience on a journey through cities after dark.

Participants stepped into different urban settings (inner city, mixed-use fringe and periphery) and personas to explore a simple question: does the same journey stay accessible when the city moves from day to night?

The discussions showed how relational night-time accessibility is. Distance alone tells us very little:
🕘 Time changes proximity. A nearby service is out of reach if it’s closed, or if the last connection has already left.
🚏 Waiting is the most vulnerable moment. Isolated stops, poor visibility, no shelter, and the discomfort of standing still in an empty place.
One route, different burdens. A broken lift blocks a wheelchair user, an older resident needs places to rest, and a night-shift worker depends on affordable connections at fixed times.
🧩 Solutions must work as a package. Lighting alone can’t make up for inaccessible paths, fast traffic or missing services.

The groups proposed safe and active mobility hubs, step-free routes with rest points, safer crossings, demand-responsive night transport and even neighbourhood walking-companion schemes.

Participants came from many parts of the world, which made the conversation especially valuable. Experiences of moving through cities at night differed a lot across geographic and cultural contexts, from perceptions of safety and activity to transport availability and expectations of public space.

Thank you to everyone who joined us, shared their experiences and challenged our assumptions! 🌍🌙

16/10/2026

🌍 Different cities. Shared challenges. New perspectives.

From 7–9 October, the URBASOFIA team participated in the Emerging Communities Forum 2026 in Istanbul, proudly joining the event as one of its official sponsors.

Three days of inspiring conversations, urban stories, and knowledge exchange with professionals, researchers, and city representatives from across the world.

We particularly appreciated the Forum’s global openness and its emphasis on learning from different contexts, experiences, and perspectives.

And what better setting than Istanbul? A city that has long brought together people, cultures, and ideas, even across political and geographical divides. A fitting place for discussions among friends about the future of our cities.

For us, the key takeaway is simple: harnessing and sharing knowledge is essential to shaping better urban futures.

We were glad to contribute, listen, learn, and connect!
A big thank you to the IUPF and ITU CURE teams, the organisers, speakers, and participants for making this exchange possible.

📸 A few moments from Istanbul.

🔜 Coming next: Insights from our two workshops on Mobility by Night and Boosting Rural Areas’ Sustainable Competitiveness.

29/09/2026

How do cities turn political will into structured, lasting cooperation between education, employers and public authorities? That question drove the European Urban Initiative CARE-GET Transfer City Visit in Druskininkai, Lithuania (24-25 September), where URBASOFIA led the WP6 thematic workshop on skills and industry collaboration.

The visit opened in Druskininkai's health and wellness ecosystem, from its resort, medical and rehabilitation infrastructure to the Dineika Wellness Park, a living model of a place-based wellbeing economy. From there, we shared the WP6 Collaborative Working Methodology: the quadruple helix, a repeatable cycle of evidence, co-design, validation and feedback, and four meeting formats a city can actually run. Haskovo Municipality, the project's lead city and Main Urban Authority, made it concrete with two working examples: the Growth Catalyst Coalition and its inclusive Support Group meeting.

Then, in the hands-on "Your Local Skills Lab" with European Urban Initiative Transfer Expert Sandra Rainero, Druskininkai, Komotini - City for All and Siena each mapped their ecosystem, named the missing link, and designed a first coordination meeting to get cooperation moving.

The takeaway: the real barrier is rarely funding. It's coordination. Build the mechanism before you scale.

Thanks to the Druskininkų savivaldybė for hosting, and to all our CARE-GET partners. The work continues online on 4 November.

Alexandra Zlotea Miruna Draghia Adelin Lazăr

16/09/2026

Last week, URBASOFIA joined the WOODCIRCLES event in Tartu, Estonia, where the project’s Travelling Demonstrator was presented in its first full installation at the Estonian National Museum.

The demonstrator brings WOODCIRCLES’ research in practice, showing how timber buildings can be designed not for a single use, but for multiple lives. The structure combines modular mass-timber components and recovered timber through reversible connections and Design for Assembly and Disassembly. It can be assembled, dismantled, and reconfigured, demonstrating how buildings can function as material banks and keep valuable timber resources in circulation for longer.

During the Tartu event, URBASOFIA led the implementation of co-designed activities aimed at reaching different targets of local stakeholders, ranging from sector professionals to students and the general public. This was achieved through a series of interactive activities, including a 'Walk and Talk' session with the technical partner explaining the elements of the prototype, a hands-on workshop for students led by ICONS and a final policy panel to discuss the potential of circular construction within the national and local policy framework for the city of Tartu.

And Tartu is only the beginning. 🌍
The journeys will continue to Turin and Rotterdam taking on a different configuration at each stop and generating practical knowledge about reuse, adaptability and circular construction along the way.

📷 Ph Marion Kade

11/09/2026

Highlights from the CAST SCOM meeting in Budva-Petrovac, Montenegro, where URBASOFIA, as SO2 Lead, brought together all 11 pilot partners for a progress check-in, and early ideas for accessible tourism offers started taking shape. Swipe through for the details.

Looking forward to the next milestones as CAST continues building lighthouse resilient communities through culture.

A big thank you to Urbani kult for the careful organisation, and to our Lead Partner Iskriva for their continued coordination.

Project

23/07/2026

Last week, our colleague Irina Alexandra Panait represented URBASOFIA at the Danube Festival in Ulm & Neu-Ulm, Germany — as part of our ongoing work as partner in ELEVATE, the Interreg Danube project on Age-Friendly Cities.

The programme offered a rare, hands-on look at age-friendly policy in practice: visits to the Generationentreff, the University of the Third Age at Ulm University, and an intergenerational housing project, alongside sessions on fall prevention and digital tools helping older adults stay independent at home. Three days of real-world inspiration for what we work on every day.

At the "Democracy Needs Everyone" conference on July 10th, Irina moderated Table 19: Democracy and Age — a roundtable on why social security is inseparable from democratic participation, and why older citizens belong at the centre of civic life, not at its margins.
Irina also presented the ELEVATE model during the afternoon working group session, showcasing how our transnational partnership is turning the age-friendly city concept into concrete tools, policies and practices across the Danube region.

We're proud to have URBASOFIA's voice in these conversations — and to be part of a network where research, local governance and civil society genuinely talk to each other.

Address

Strada Frumoasa, Nr. 8
Bucharest
010985

Opening Hours

Monday	09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	09:00 - 17:00
Thursday	09:00 - 17:00
Friday	09:00 - 17:00

Website

http://www.urbasofia.eu/

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