The Compact Cities Partnership publishes its Orientation Paper
The Compact Cities Partnership works towards integrated urban planning, contained sprawl, wise densification, and urban regeneration for more resilient, inclusive and sustainable cities.
Its strategic ambition is structured around three complementary and mutually reinforcing focus areas: containment, densification and regeneration, which together form the conceptual backbone of sustainable urban development.
The Compact Cities Partnership works towards integrated urban planning, contained sprawl, wise densification, and urban regeneration for more resilient, inclusive and sustainable cities.
The Orientation Paper is the result of an intensive collaborative process carried out between January and June 2026.
Through six online Partnership meetings, an in-person meeting in Leiden (April 22–23, 2026) and a series of Working Group sessions, partners mapped more than 100 topics of interest, which were then clustered, debated and voted on.
This process led to the establishment of five Working Groups, reflecting the Partnership's five thematic priorities:
- Definitions, Concepts and Indicators — building a common framework, shared glossary and indicator set to support evidence-based compact city policies across Europe.
- Functional Urban Areas — strengthening cross-municipal cooperation, multilevel governance and integrated territorial planning at the scale where urban dynamics really operate.
- Land Value Capture Instruments — exploring how increases in land value generated by public investment can be captured and reinvested to steer development inward rather than outward.
- Affordable Housing — ensuring that densification and affordability go hand in hand, in synergy with the European Affordable Housing Plan.
- Regeneration of the Built Environment — prioritising brownfield redevelopment, heritage-led regeneration and the adaptive reuse of existing buildings, starting from the premise that the most sustainable building is often the one that already exists.
Across all five Working Groups, the Partnership will prioritise knowledge exchange, capacity building and the co-production of actionable outputs, from good practice guides to self-assessment tools for local authorities, in line with the Urban Agenda for the EU's three pillars of Better Regulation, Better Funding and Better Knowledge.
With the Orientation Paper finalised, the Partnership now moves into the next phase: the design of its Action Plan.
The full Orientation Paper is available for download here.
