A piece about gentrification, Pop-Up City? What year is it, 2011?

Yeah, yeah…

Gentrification is the catch-all term for everything that goes wrong in cities, which is why it has stopped meaning anything. The word is worn out, but the subject isn’t exhausted. What was once a single process, an oil slick spreading through a city, has become a family of mechanisms, each with its own engine and its own face. Today: 5 new shapes of gentrification, from satellite cities to pistachification and the barrier across the street.

1. Satellite gentrification

Gentrification is often seen as something that happens within a single city. Satellite gentrification jumps to another city, driven by price pressure in the primary city. The second city becomes the escape hatch for the creative class and investors who can no longer afford the first. The engine here is price pressure combined with accessibility.

You see it between Paris and Bordeaux. Gabriel Loumeau and Antonio Russo studied what happened after the Paris–Bordeaux high-speed rail line opened in July 2017. Skilled workers moved from Paris to Bordeaux and Rennes, house prices rose about 12%, and median income in central neighbourhoods went up. A similar process is playing out from Toronto to Hamilton and from London to Bristol. In China, young people are leaving mega-cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen for Dali in Yunnan, a mid-sized city on a mountain lake with lower living costs and an emerging creative scene.

2. Rural gentrification

Where satellite gentrification jumps from city to city, rural gentrification crosses the city boundary into the countryside. The engine here is different: not price pressure alone, but the desire for peace and space, made possible by remote work. That’s also why COVID gave it such a boost, when cooped-up urbanites headed for the countryside en masse.

With a growing critical mass of style-conscious, well-off newcomers, village streets suddenly sprout urban amenities like specialty coffee, coworking, and design stores, while the original village functions (the baker, the pub, the grocer) disappear. For governments, it can be a welcome strategy to attract newcomers to shrinking regions, as in Japan and Germany.

Want to read more about the urban-to-rural shift? Here’s our in-depth research (in Dutch), and our English article series.

3. Pistachification

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Hi there. New Balance recently opened a pop-up restaurant in Copenhagen. Complete with custom ‘running tables’ and foodie events for runners, the restaurant was all about connecting with the local running scene in a fresh way.

Competitor Hoka took things a step further in London by opening its very own corner store on Bethnal Green Road. The little spot was decked out in bright neon lights and looked just like a classic East London mini-mart, complete with an ATM out front. But step inside, and you’d find pure running heaven packed with all the latest gear.

Back between 2005 and 2010, they were everywhere. Since Comme des Garçons paved the way with its iconic guerrilla stores, almost every major brand joined the pop-up-store party. But as usually happens when everyone jumps on a trend, the magic wore off. Pop-ups got predictable, criticised, and lost their guerrilla vibe.

Now, pop-ups are making a comeback.

The digital attention economy has become too noisy and polluted, making it super hard for brands to stand out, let alone build trust. People are getting tired of looking at screens and second-guessing everything they see. Going back into the real physical world gives brands an edge to connect on a human level again and build a sense of realness.

That said, today’s pop-ups aren’t just a rerun of the early 2000s. Simply opening a space in a vacant spot isn’t enough any more. The new generation of pop-ups need a spark, a bold design, an unexpected collaboration, or a genuine connection to a local community. Either way, it would be great news for high streets everywhere. A little extra energy and surprise on the sidewalk is always welcome.

Elsewhere

Joop recently hosted an episode of the podcast Algoritme van de Stad on temporary urban development. Do successful initiatives deserve a permanent spot, or is the power of the temporary precisely that it’s temporary? He discussed it with Jesse Jorg (RAUM, STIPO, We the City), Sabrina Lindemann (I’M BINCK, Op Trek) and Karin Christof. (Sorry to our international readers: this podcast is in Dutch.)

Jeroen spent a weekend in Eindhoven and felt an energy that Amsterdam seems to have lost a long time ago. ASML, Europe’s most valuable tech company, has a clear impact on the city, which transformed from a collection of farming villages via Philips city into a cosmopolitan maker and design hub. While Amsterdam seems to get lost in zero-sum debates about who the city belongs to, Eindhoven has a just-do-it mentality. Less talking, more making.

Tokyo proves that club culture doesn’t always have to be about dancing, drinking and raving all night. This basement bar in Shimokitazawa hosts book raves: visitors read in silence, swap books and share stories, with ambient music playing in the background. Rugs turn the club into a kind of shared living room during the day. A striking alternative to the classic club night, and perhaps a sign that young people are looking for new places to be together without alcohol at the centre.

Pop-Up City Radar is live. 1,100+ urban innovations from 400 cities, 18 years in the making. Browse the globe, the trend series, or the growing archive. We’re adding new stories every week, so keep checking back.

Also, we just got the keys to this concrete bunker next to our PoPPo department store and offices in the busy heart of North Amsterdam. Two floors and 700 m² full of imagination, perfect for galleries, events, maker spaces, or your next wild idea. Get in touch if you’re interested, we’re happy to show you around.

Elsewhere

Stockholm launched a street furniture collection made from leftover construction waste. Most recycling projects hide their origins. This one doesn’t, and that’s exactly what makes it inspiring. More on Designboom.

The Marginalian writes about ma (間), the Japanese concept of the interval: the emptiness between things, the pause between moments. Not absence, but space where something new can emerge. Architect Kengo Kuma calls it the most important space in Japanese architecture. What if we applied that to cities? Streets and squares designed with deliberate gaps. Emptiness and silence as structural elements, not leftover space. More in our Urban calm series.

Space is increasingly scarce. So why build a new café when there are already hundreds of perfectly good restaurants sitting empty for half the day? That’s the simple idea behind Asano, founded by Kate Kaneko in New York City. Instead of opening a conventional café, Kaneko operates as a ‘barista in residence’, taking over existing restaurants during their quieter hours. The tables, kitchen infrastructure and other facilities are already there. Asano simply puts them to work at a different time of day. More ideas on hybrid space here.

Ma and mottainai sit in an interesting tension: one values emptiness, the other calls it waste. Two Japanese concepts, two opposite answers to the empty city. Have a nice weekend.

The sports complex is a fossil of the industrial age. While our cities are densifying and the demand for space is exploding, sports clubs are still hijacking thousands of square metres of precious land behind closed fences. It’s time to liberate sport from its reserve.

Tactical stadium infrastructure

Nike recently sent a powerful signal with the ACG All Conditions Cup System. This is a modular stadium kit consisting of 1,600 parts that allows you to transform any inhospitable location — from a beach to a desert — into an arena. That this is more than a marketing gimmick is proven by the collaboration with football club Internazionale, with whom a complete competition has been set up on uncharted territory. Today a match, tomorrow an empty plain again.

This project touches upon a fundamental shift in our urban logic: space no longer adapts to the sport. The sport must adapt to the city.

Geometric hacking: ditches as rule-breakers

When we dare to radically merge sport and landscape, new forms of usage emerge. We call this geometric hacking. An iconic example is the Poldercup by artist Maider López. She asked the right question: why do we need standardised football pitches when we already have miles of meadow? In her experiment, the Dutch ditches (“sloten”) were not obstacles, but an essential, tactical part of the game.

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Hey, have you stopped by our neighbourhood department store PoPPo? You can eat, shop and get a haircut. We also have a dark concrete space available to hire for exhibitions, film nights, product launches, yoga classes, private dining or dance events. Looking for something more intimate? Tucked away in the depths of the building, there’s a hidden Amsterdam speakeasy. Here’s some more information.

Elsewhere

The city is shrinking. Not because there’s less of it, but because smaller is increasingly proving smarter. Look:

Councils manage thousands of small patches of green. Often neglected, and costly to maintain. London has therefore introduced ‘right to grow’ in parts of the city. Residents can use unused scraps of municipal greenery to grow their own fruit and vegetables. Smart, but also a quiet admission that the council hadn’t managed it themselves for years.

Take me to a K-bar. In Busan, South Korea, Blue House on the Stairs serves drinks through a tiny window that’s also too high up. To solve that inconvenience, your K-latte travels to you by balloon. The window is the bar, the balloon is the waiter. Every constraint is a design decision.

Monocab designed self-driving on-demand mini-cabins that run on disused railway tracks in rural Germany. Monocab is light, affordable, and you book it via an app. KVG Lippe hopes to tackle transport poverty in left-behind regions. Don’t count on riding the Monocab this summer though — the project is still in its testing phase and is currently moving mostly European subsidies from A to B.

America has a new pizza phenomenon. Casey’s Pizza runs micro-pizzerias as shop-in-shops inside petrol stations. Fresh pizzas prepared in under 6 m². According to the annual Pizza Report, Casey’s has rapidly grown into the fifth-largest pizza chain in the US, carried by a cult-like fanbase. The best pizzeria in America doesn’t need a kitchen — just a petrol station.

Recently, we came across a graph with a clear message: by the end of 2025, spending on building data centres in the US overtook that on office buildings for the first time in history. The need for desks is going down, while the hunger for server racks is endless.

The reason is no mystery: AI. We’re getting used to nervous headlines about waves of layoffs — most recently with Block, which showed a massive chunk of its workforce the door. Expenditure on human capital (desks, coffee machines, meeting rooms) is plummeting, while spending on API tokens and cloud capacity continues to soar. We’re witnessing the rapid rackification of our commercial landscape.

The death of the desk

According to Anthropic, we’re only at the beginning of this shift. Many of the roles under pressure are knowledge-intensive: legal, financial, analytical. Perhaps Anthropic is exaggerating, but the trend is clear.

Data centres are gradually taking over the role of office buildings, just as bots are taking over the tasks of knowledge workers. So, where does that leave our shiny Central Business Districts? Is this necessarily bad news for our cities? Not really.

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For the past month, the window of our department store PoPPo has been full of plants. Our latest venture is called PoPPo Plants, and we’re selling a personal selection of our favourites. We’ve already discovered that dotted leaves are all the rage. No webshop, but open Tuesday to Sunday.

Elsewhere

Buildings, interiors, websites… everything is starting to look the same. Almost 10 years ago, Kyle Chayka coined the term airspace for this. Now that more and more cultural output is coming out of pre-chewed AI sludge, the situation isn’t getting any better. Economist Tyler Cowen and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison are trying to change that. They’re on the hunt for 21ˢᵗ-century aesthetics, and they’re willing to pay for it.

The British project Vertical Meadow is turning graffiti walls, hoardings and bus shelters into (surprise, surprise) vertical flower meadows. Flowers in places you wouldn’t expect. Good for insects. And suddenly, a hoarding is no excuse.

This sales website for a resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, lets you fly over the landscape like a bird, almost like a video game. Pretty neat and quite different from the usual real estate sites. If you spot more of these unusual sites, let us know. Maybe we’ll put together a listicle one day.

Beware of the mothballs

Forget the sterile dreams of the smart city, or the cookie-cutter flagship stores of fast-fashion giants. The real revolution on our high streets smells faintly of mothballs and looks like a 1990s ski jacket. We are witnessing the rise of vintagefication, a trend where vintage has stepped out of the shadows of dusty peripheral thrift shops to colonise prime retail real estate.

Not so long ago, second-hand shops were the exclusive domain of the budget-conscious or the eccentric collector. They were charmingly messy places tucked away in the city’s fringes. That image has been flipped on its head.

Last year, we noticed the first signs of vintagefication on Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat, the city’s most commercial shopping street and long-time capital of retail blandness. Suddenly, three vintage stores were sitting side-by-side, holding their own against the polished windows of the fast-fashion giants. In an era in which everything becomes the same everywhere, these businesses bring back a bit of soul and specificity that makes a district worth visiting.

The resale explosion in numbers

Resale is outpacing fashion. The second-hand market is growing 2.7× faster than the regular apparel market, according to ThredUp’s Resale Report 2025.

Second-hand is mainstream. By 2024, 58% of all consumers were shopping second-hand. Among younger generations, that figure was as high as 68%. Today’s consumers no longer see “new” as the standard, but as a lack of creativity.

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The bankruptcy of the Dutch Blokker household store chain in 2024 was more than just the loss of a place to buy vacuum cleaner bags and drying racks. It was a symbolic end to the era of the Big Box retailer — the generic, one-size-fits-all model that dominated our shopping centres for decades. But in the vacuum left by these retail dinosaurs, something interesting is growing.

This Sunday, PoPPo opens its doors in Amsterdam-Noord. Occupying the 600 m² carcass of a former Blokker store, our first pop-up department store is a live experiment in urban regeneration. It replaces the monolithic retailer with a chaotic, curated mix of hyper-local entrepreneurs, education, and culture.

It’s an example of the micro-space revolution we have been tracking. And it might just be the blueprint for saving our shopping centres. For us, PoPPo is our first actual project dealing with micro-space.

The rise of the micro-mall

We’ve written before about small being the new big, and how rising rents make large commercial spaces a gamble that few can afford. When a giant like Blokker falls, it leaves behind square footage that is too large and too expensive for almost anyone else. The solution? Compartmentalisation.

PoPPo creates a micro-mall within the shell of the old store. By breaking the space down, it allows entry for those who actually bring flavour to a city:

• Vintage fashion: curated second-hand collections from POP18 and VUNK.

• The service economy: a beauty court featuring The Living Groom and Nail’d By.

• Local hospitality: Keuken van de Markt provides a test kitchen for local chefs.

• Education as anchor: interestingly, Hogeschool Inholland is moving in to provide on-site education, turning a shop floor into a classroom.

• On the same floor, Papaver Amsterdam’s hidden speakeasy offers space for events and workshops.

This aligns perfectly with the trend seen in other global cities, where subdividing commercial space reduces financial risk for landlords and creates a vibrant, resilient ecosystem for tenants.

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Tired of seeing urban potential locked behind red tape?

We believe cities thrive on action, not another round of consultations. That’s why we teamed up with urban design collectives Basurama (Madrid) and Urban Foxes (Brussels) to create (H)Activate the City, with support from the EU’s Erasmus+ programme.

It’s a hands-on guide to urban hacking, made for young people, youth workers, and placemakers who want to make things happen. Inside you’ll find 9 concrete manuals for clever, direct interventions that turn ideas into action. No endless meetings, just doing.

Curious?

Download for free

When cities become beauty machines

The ground floors of the newly completed residential towers in Amsterdam-Noord speak volumes. Large window stickers promise a new lifestyle: a transformation not just of the neighbourhood, but of the body. Names like Infinity Lifters, Brazilian Body Wax, RoForm, TrainMore, and Beauty by Sumaya are just a sample of the recent arrivals on a single street corner.

On the spot where cheap furniture stores and car garages once dominated, a true beauty district is emerging. Services related to fitness, health, and beauty treatments are clustering and defining the streetscape. This concentration of boutique health and beauty concepts is no accident: it reflects the zeitgeist, driven by the individualist lifestyle and health cult among urbanites on one hand, and the patterns of urban development in emerging districts on the other.

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Dive into the urban sticker scene

Earlier this year we explored the urban sticker scene, showing how stickers can be gateways to hidden subcultures, obscure musicians, and undiscovered artists. Next Friday in Amsterdam, we’re organising a walk through the city’s best sticker spots. Co-hosted by sticker connaissseur Jeroen van Mourik of Stickit, we’ll give you a glimpse into the rich worlds hidden behind the sticky images on lampposts and electrical boxes. Want to join? Sign up at stadslezers.club or email mail@popupcity.net — we have 3 tickets to give away.

Help build the department store of the future

In the heart of Amsterdam-Noord, Poppo is taking shape: two floors, 600 m², 1.5 years of constant evolution. Retail, food, drinks, work, and culture all intertwine from dawn till late. We’re looking for makers, chefs, entrepreneurs, and creatives to join us. Whether it’s a shop, studio, film night, or yoga space — let’s build it together. More info at popupcity.net/warenhuis.

Wanted: your favourite urban hack

Together with Urban Foxes from Brussels and Basurama from Madrid, and with support from the Erasmus+ Youth programme, we’re putting together a booklet on urban hacking for young city-dwellers. Why? To show them that they can take control of public space and add things if they want to. We hope to inspire a new, free-thinking generation of urban hackers to shape the cities of tomorrow. A booklet isn’t complete without great examples. What’s the coolest urban hack you’ve come across recently? Email a link or photo to mail@popupcity.net and earn a spot in the colophon of the book!

Last but not least

💰 Public space is an asset, not a liability. The World Bank now recognises what we’ve long known: public space is a city’s hidden treasure. Their new report highlights the enormous value waiting to be unlocked in streets, squares, and parks. Free download available:

The Hidden Wealth Of Cities

23.2MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

🫟 The favourite street artist of landlords. Ghost Pitùr from Brescia, Italy, spends his days painting façades. By night, he removes unwanted graffiti, restoring walls to the correct RAL colours. He’s not a graffiti-hater, he says — he just knows the difference between art and vandalism.

🏃 Conquer your neighbourhood by running. INTVL, an Australian running app and game, lets you conquer neighbourhoods by running. Other runners can reclaim territory, turning city streets into a lively game of urban Risk.

Last week, following our work on a new exciting space in Amsterdam, Poppo (more on that later) I had a chat with one of the founders of the nightclub Garage Noord. We were talking about the future of nightlife in big cities, especially Amsterdam, and the challenges facing hospitality, entertainment, and clubs. Our conversation prompted me to share some thoughts and trends on the future of the night.

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Ten years was once the lower limit for a temporary initiative, partly for legal reasons. Today, that’s unthinkable. Now that pop-up has become established and the chance of success has increased, competition in the temporary segment is intensifying. Simply put, more parties are willing to pay for a space.

This dynamic has a twofold effect. Commercial ventures are pushing more experimental projects into even shorter time slots, while the very concept of temporary is compressing: from ten years to a few months, and sometimes just a matter of days.

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Pioneering in the interspace

On a sunny morning in April 2008, we found ourselves in the Berlin office of landscape architect Klaus Overmeyer. We had just launched a blog called Pop-Up City and were visiting the German capital, one of the few places where the temporary and flexible dimension of urban planning was already tangible. At the time, exactly two books existed on the subject, one of which was Overmeyer’s Urban Pioneers.

In his book, Overmeyer highlighted dozens of Berlin initiatives in “spaces currently unsuitable or undesirable in mainstream economic cycles.” Berlin, as a broke, half-bankrupt city, had an abundance of such spaces back then. Pop-up was an almost subversive domain of squatters and neighbourhood initiatives, flying far below the radar of government authorities and commercial developers. Overmeyer saw its potential and argued for the formal integration of temporary use into urban policy.

Long live transition hysteria

Nearly two decades later, his wish has been granted, but in a way few could have foreseen. Temporality and flexibility have become crucial, simply because the future can no longer be cast in concrete. The world is hyper-connected, changing too quickly and chaotically. Policy has to adapt to the whims of the day. Add to that the pace of technological acceleration — a start-up founded in Silicon Valley today can cause policy headaches for a European government tomorrow — and you understand why rigid, cumbersome structures no longer work.

This has led to what one might call transition hysteria: a permanent state of renovation for our institutions, our systems, and the city itself. In this context, pop-up is no longer an interim solution. It has become a core strategy.

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Amsterdam turns 750 this year. Happy birthday! The main event? Op de Ring — a weekend-long transformation of the city’s A10 ring road into a stage for fun runs, concerts, a pop-up forest, weddings and more. (We’re giving away 4 tickets. Interested? Email us before 4 PM CET!)

Amsterdam’s ring road festival is an iconic gesture with international flair, but also something that disappears as quickly as it appears. And the lead-up hasn’t been smooth: criticism is already mounting, especially about how few people are actually allowed to attend the festivities on the motorway. Which raises a broader question: how to properly celebrate a city birthday?

Let’s take a look at previous jubilees in a few world cities. Think commemorative coins, grand exhibitions and nostalgic coffee-table books, but also failed mega-projects, sky-high ambitions, surprising successes and lasting legacies.

Amsterdam 700: nodding entertainment with a top gift

Amsterdam marked its 700ᵗʰ anniversary in 1975 with parades, concerts, drawing contests, fishing tournaments, birthday songs and generous doses of royal attention as this video shows:

The big crowd-puller was Mokum 700, an exhibition at the RAI convention centre featuring scale reconstructions of parts of the city. But the true gift to Amsterdam was something new: the very first edition of Sail Amsterdam, a boat parade that became a five-yearly international spectacle.

Rotterdam 650: the funfair flop

Rotterdam celebrated its 650ᵗʰ anniversary in 1990. Alongside a commemorative coin (the Porter), a massive festival called Rivoli was planned for the Müllerpier. It was a disaster: the public stayed away, lawsuits followed, and millions were lost.

London 2000: birthday as a city-building strategy?

London is nearly 2,000 years old. Preparations for its 2053 milestone haven’t officially started, but the grand ideas are already on the table — from a New London on the moon, to turning the O2 Arena into a giant birthday cake (😁), to a 2,000-metre glass skyscraper.

Historically, London has used birthdays to drive urban transformation. The Great Exhibition of 1851 brought the Crystal Palace, Royal Albert Hall and Imperial College. Not a bad haul. The Festival of Britain in 1951 delivered the Southbank Centre and a new postwar cultural identity.

Paris 2000: pomp, pride and fireworks

Paris knows how to go big. Its 2,000ᵗʰ birthday in 1951 was marked by military parades, flag-lined boulevards and fireworks displays. France had recently emerged victorious from the war — and it celebrated itself more than the city.

New York 400: introspection over celebration

New York City turns 400 in 2025. The official programme, Founded by NYC, launched by mayor Eric Adams, is full of events, but there’s a cautious tone. The focus is on reflection: the city’s colonial origins, its Indigenous history and the Caribbean diaspora take centre stage. Less jubilation, more self-examination.

The mood of the moment

Perhaps a city’s birthday says more about the era than the city itself. Sometimes it’s about pride, sometimes future visions, sometimes national ego, sometimes communal doubt. Cities present themselves as confident powers or chaotic parties — or as communities still figuring things out. Few manage to use the moment to create a real legacy — though some do. And even when the planning takes years, public embarrassment is never far off.

In many newly built urban neighbourhoods in the Netherlands, 40% of the houses are social rented. The aim is clear: to keep cities liveable and accessible for people on lower incomes. Yet the shops, cafés and restaurants in these same neighbourhoods are completely left to the whims of the free market. The result? Life in these areas becomes unaffordable for exactly those residents social housing is meant to support. Shouldn’t we also be thinking about social retail — local amenities that help make daily life affordable?

The case for social retail

For decades, housing associations have played a vital role in ensuring that low-income urban residents have a place to live. Increasingly, they’re also a key mechanism for keeping those people in the city. While debates around gentrification often focus on rising housing costs, the soaring cost of living is discussed far less — even though it’s spiralling out of control. The social housing model provides a clear blueprint for adapting this logic to the retail landscape.

New inner-city neighbourhoods could benefit from a structure that ensures not only affordable housing but also affordable living. It’s time to start building social retail.

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Over the past year, we’ve quietly worked on a new chapter for Pop-Up City. Now it’s almost ready, and we’re excited to share it with you: Boswald — our tasteful, calming woodland cabin at the edge of a vast Belgian forest, just across the border from Maastricht.

We took a forgotten wooden cabin and transformed it into something that feels like a deep breath. Not your average holiday home, but a temporary retreat for makers, thinkers, dreamers and doers. We personally redesigned and rebuilt the interior from scratch, crafting a warm and inviting space that truly reflects our values of simplicity and comfort. We upgraded the cabin with sustainable materials, making sure it’s both eco-friendly and cosy. Around the house, we’ve restored and nurtured a large, wild forest garden to let nature thrive naturally over time.

Boswald is a place to retreat. To work on ideas that get lost in the busyness of everyday life. To reconnect with nature, rhythm and space. Boswald is our first independently developed space — one that embodies our ideas about how we might live, work and unwind differently, in extraordinary locations.

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Bookings will open soon. Want to be the first to know? Leave your email address and receive a 15% discount code at launch.

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Forget Uber, here comes the Banne Hopper

In the northern neighbourhood of De Banne in Amsterdam, a small electric vehicle quietly makes its rounds. Known as the Banne Hopper, this compact shuttle navigates bike paths and pavements, offering rides to locals heading to the hairdresser, the supermarket, the doctor, or even a local card game. Unlike a flashy start-up, this is a grassroots mobility initiative — entirely set up and run by the neighbourhood itself.

The Banne Hopper is a response to a problem faced by many urban areas: the lack of accessible, fine-grained public transport for those with limited mobility — often older adults or people with disabilities. Since the opening of Amsterdam’s North-South metro line in 2018, many local bus routes have disappeared. For some, this has made even the nearest supermarket or GP difficult to reach. When the last supermarket in De Banne closed, locals took action, launching the Banne Hopper to fill the gap. A round trip costs just €2.50.

Now operating as a foundation, the Banne Hopper is entirely run by volunteers, funded by local housing associations, a nearby hospital, and the City of Amsterdam. From drivers to phone operators and planners, everything is managed by residents.

What are the key ingredients to its success, and what valuable insights can it offer urban planners, designers, and authorities?

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A new walking club for city lovers

Our buddy Jesse Jorg has teamed up with Utrecht-based RAUM to launch Wandelclub der Stadslezers — a walking club that invites you to see the city through someone else’s eyes. A pigeon’s. A loitering teenager’s. An eel’s. A tunnel’s. A sticker artist’s. A migrant’s. We designed and built the website — complete with shop integration — and we’ll be hosting our own walk in early October. We’re giving away three memberships. Fancy joining? Drop us a line at mail@popupcity.net.

(H)Activate Brussels

On Saturday 10 May, we're teaming up with Urban Foxes and Basurama to host a mini festival of urban hacktivism at TRACK Brussels. Throughout the day, we’ll explore a range of mini hacks, interventions and placemaking tools — first through hands-on workshops, then by taking them to the streets to test them out in the wild. The festival kicks off at 11:00 with coffee and biscuits. Feel free to drop by! (This project is supported by the EU’s Erasmus+ Youth programme.)

Last but not least

🚪 Ukrainian multimedia artist Karyna Budaieva, better known as ERRXD, creates mesmerising videos that bring raw everyday street objects — like doors, graffiti, and electrical boxes — to life in a kaleidoscopic fashion. Her work was recently featured at the Light Visions exhibition, hosted by Art Innovation Gallery in Times Square, New York City. Curious how she makes her hypnotic creations? She shares tutorials so you can start animating the public realm yourself.

🥕 In many cities, urban allotments are under pressure from growing urban development. But in London, a new programme is being launched to designate fresh spaces for urban food production. Demand is sky-high — with waiting lists for allotments stretching up to 17 years in some parts of the city. The shortage is especially acute in central areas, where councils have not been required to provide allotment land since 1963. That might now be about to change.

🚇 More news from the British capital: engineer Ben James has created a stunning 3D map of the London Underground, showing the real-time locations of trains as they move through the city. The data comes from Transport for London, which offers an API with live train arrival times.