📢 New Publication: Urban Revitalization & Neoliberalism: A Policy Analysis of the European City Context

Across Europe, cities are being reshaped by neoliberal planning, financialization, and smart‑city agendas. HDRI’s final 2025 paper, from the Economic, Social and Cultural rights thematic area, unpacks how these forces intersect with spatial polarization, gentrification, and youth precarity, and how they redefine what participation, inclusion, and the right to the city mean today.

From Milan and Barcelona, our research shows how revitalization strategies, often framed as sustainable and inclusive, can instead accelerate displacement, concentrate private power, and weaken community ties. It also examines the rise of tech‑mediated governance and the EU‑backed push toward smart‑city models, where private intermediaries increasingly shape public services.

Our paper highlights pragmatic initiatives to counter this tendency. From Barcelona’s Decidim platform to experiments in technological sovereignty and remunicipalization, we show how citizen‑centered governance can challenge market‑driven narratives and reclaim urban development as a collective, democratic effort.

As European cities face mounting pressures around housing, inequality, and youth exclusion, this research argues for community‑embedded, youth‑centered, and justice‑oriented approaches to urban policy.

Read the full paper below:

Author: Agnese Aurora Bettini

Editor: Luis Felipe Garcia Aristizabal