Tobias Hager

Two years after the Eixample’s expansion of the superblock model, the most-asked question among visiting city-halls is no longer how, it’s how did the politics survive.

Five years into the rolling reduction of car space, the second-order effects are becoming visible, in air, in noise, in property prices and in who is showing up to the neighbourhood meetings.

Heat-pumps are no longer a single-family home story. From Stockholm’s district networks to a 9,000-flat retrofit in Hamburg, the technology is quietly displacing gas at city scale.

Affordable, dense, and climate-aware: a generation of architects in Lisbon is taking on the contradiction at the heart of European housing, and the city is, gingerly, helping them.

In a quiet revolt against the asphalt monoculture, Vienna is rolling out unsealed lanes, planted curbs and rain-fed gardens. The Stadt Wien is not waiting for federal climate-adaptation money, it is rewriting its own …

End-to-end smoketest of the cms.urban-future-alliance.com to Vercel pipeline.

Madrid's new urban masterplan was supposed to be a victory lap. Then the mayor walked it back herself, in front of a city council she'd cobbled together. Inside the rare political moment when a leader admitt…

Walk into the lobby of a residential block in Wood City Jätkäsaari and the first thing you notice, before the lift, before the postboxes, is the smell. It is the smell of a Finnish forest in the third week o…

Rotterdam was always going to flood. The question, when the city sat down with its national government and its harbour authority in the late 1990s, was not whether to defend against the next flood but how to design a …

After thirty years of compounding success, the Dutch capital's bicycle infrastructure is at capacity. The city's response is unfashionable: redesigning bike paths for *less* throughput, more pause, more conf…

From Lausanne to Lyon, four cities have lifted Zurich's whole-life-cost tender template. We tracked the document's spread, talked to the procurers who adopted it, and asked the original author if he expected…

A small office in Warsaw's Praga district has spent five years writing speculative briefs for buildings that will never be built. Their archives are now being cited by city architects across the bloc. We open the…

When a court in Lombardy reclassified gig couriers as employees in March, one rider was named on the front page. Six months later she's still riding — and the labour code she helped redraw is heading to the Itali…

Greece's capital pulled up 14 km of arterial asphalt in 18 months. The temperature data is one story. The acoustic data is another. The third — and least expected — is a 19% drop in summer hospital admissions in …

The German Building Energy Act, the Gebäudeenergiegesetz revised in autumn 2023 and in force from the first of January 2024, was meant to make residential heating in Berlin look like residential heating in Stockh…

Copenhagen publishes a cycling-policy document that other European cities tend to treat as a curiosity rather than an instrument. The Cykelregnskab, the city's biennial Cycle Account, is the only such report in the wo…

A small contracting irregularity in 2024 became a year-long parliamentary inquiry, then became the most stringent municipal procurement law in central Europe. The before-and-after, with the names that matter.

A generation of Spanish architects under 35 are designing the housing tenders most of the country lives in — without ever appearing on a public byline. We spent two months trying to find them. They almost agreed to be…

The eleventh arrondissement of Paris is the densest in the city, the second-densest residential district in Europe, and one of the few places in central Paris where, on a hot July afternoon, you can walk along a pavem…

The Värtaverket plant in northern Stockholm burns wood chips at temperatures hot enough to keep a quarter of a million homes warm through a Swedish winter. It is the largest biomass-fired combined heat and power …

After ten years of polite refusal, Transport for London has released a complete real-time API for buses, tubes, cycle hire and dock-bike use. We talked to the engineers who pushed it through, and to the small-team app…

Lyon retired its trams in 1957. The new ones started running in January 2001. Between those two dates the city built a metro, watched the population of central Lyon decline, and discovered that the absence of a tram n…

A small directorate inside the European Commission is currently drafting the regulation that will govern how every capital in the bloc reports on heat adaptation by 2028. The lead author has never given an interview. …

The artisans who keep the Portuguese capital's azulejo facades alive are quietly retraining for thermal-retrofit work. The pay is better. The cultural cost is one of the most difficult conversations in Lisbon urb…

A loose collective of Romanian architects has spent two years simply refusing public commissions they consider environmentally indefensible. The city is starting to listen. The architects are starting to lose work. Bo…

Hungary's capital has built a sensor grid of 2.400 air-temperature probes across its districts. The maps it produces are uncomfortable reading. They are also being used — for the first time — to set school-closur…