A Manifesto for Future Cities

A call to action from the 15th Ljubljana Forum applying the Three Horizons framework to shape cities of well-being.

For a long time, conversations about future cities have been pulled in two directions. On one side, powerful images of progress: taller buildings, faster systems, smarter technologies. On the other, a growing unease that these same trajectories are stretching cities socially, environmentally, and emotionally, often faster than our capacity to govern them. Reflections on future cities point to a deeper issue: cities are not only struggling with what kind of futures they are heading toward, but also with how to consciously move away from paths that no longer serve them and collectively define their future, with well-being emerging as a meaningful—yet hard to operationalize—compass for urban development.

It is precisely within this space of tension that the Ljubljana Forum on the Future of Cities was born. For fifteen years, the Forum has operated as a meeting ground between foresight, urban practice, and technology, intentionally connecting long-term thinking with policy, planning, finance, and implementation. Rather than treating the future as an abstract horizon, it has framed anticipation as a working discipline that helps cities make sense of uncertainty while staying anchored in real decisions and investments.

The 2025 edition, marking the Forum’s fifteenth anniversary, builds on this trajectory. It reflects a maturation from asking what future cities might look like to exploring how cities can develop the capacity to shape their futures, with well-being as a guiding orientation rather than a decorative outcome. Through thematic sessions and the application of a Three Horizons exercise, participants explored current urban pressures, long-term aspirations, and the transition pathways needed to move toward cities of well-being, providing the foundation for the Ljubljana Forum Manifesto 2025 launched at the end of the event.

15th Ljubljana Forum

The 15th Ljubljana Forum (2025), held on October 2-3, 2025 at the Ljubljana Castle and dedicated to the topic “City of Well-Being: Sports and Recreation Infrastructure”, brought together mayors, planners, architects, academics, financiers, NGOs, industry leaders, and young voices to explore how cities must evolve in an era defined by climate pressure, social fragmentation, digital acceleration, and generational change. A central message emerged clearly: cities can no longer be designed solely for efficiency, growth, or attractiveness, but must consider well-being, a combination of physical and mental health, social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and democratic participation, and shift from performance to fulfillment for all.

Sports and recreation infrastructure emerged as a significant expression of well-being during the forum. Rather than being treated as optional services, they were framed as core urban infrastructure, essential to physical and mental health, social cohesion, and resilience, on pair with mobility, housing, and education. Architect Peter Lorenz, who received the Ljubljana Forum Award 2025 for the Ilirija Sports Citadel project in Ljubljana, argued that ensuring the survival of democratic cities requires architects and planners to design them as spaces for living dialogue among citizens. He also emphasized the importance of engaging the peripheries to avoid creating “Disney parks,” and highlighted participation and transparency as essential elements of quality planning. The political dimension of well-being was further explored through the perspectives of city leaders. Mayors and representatives from Ljubljana, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, and Nova Gorica shared how their cities are using sport, culture, digital tools, and citizen participation within their 2030 visions to respond to very different but equally demanding challenges, from tourism pressure and post-industrial regeneration to climate adaptation and post-conflict recovery.

Throughout the Forum, speakers also underlined that foresight should complement planning and technology, which alone are not enough to guide cities in an era of persistent uncertainty, and help cities connect immediate decisions with long-term direction while navigating geopolitical shifts, climate risks, technological disruption, and societal change. They demand new governance skills that enable cities to anticipate change and align short-term investments with long-term values. Cities today face structural challenges, from growing income inequality to employmentless economic growth, requiring new economic paradigms that balance competitiveness with social cohesion, as seen in models like the Basque approach.

The Forum discussed the idea of cities as negotiators rather than machines, living systems that mediate between competing interests, time horizons, and visions of progress, supported by foresight, planning, and participation. Anticipation, as framed in the ACT foresight framework, can become a civic skill, a practical way to imagine, prepare for, and act on change before it happens. It moves planning away from linear projections toward signal scanning, small-scale innovation testing, and long-term political cycles, turning learning into actionable policy.

Digitalization, mobility, and resilience are not just technical challenges but also opportunities for creativity and growth. Smart cities require social intelligence. They succeed when leadership precedes technology, pilot projects are tested before scaling, and citizen well-being drives decisions. Technology must serve people, and NGOs can help translate digital innovation into social value and community trust. Trust grows through openness, fairness, and participation, which also prevents “Potemkin Villages” where solutions exist on paper but not in people’s lives. Strong governance, integrated financing, and collaborative data practices help cities move from vision to action, enabling climate-neutral projects, risk management, and capacity building, while ensuring efficiency, equity, and confidence in transformation.

The Forum also looked beyond Europe, placing cities at the center of global cooperation with Africa, India, China, and Latin America. Cities thrive when “heartware”, the social and emotional infrastructure of trust, belonging, and solidarity, guides development alongside hardware and software. In such cities, social purpose takes priority over profit, and local communities are empowered to experiment and shape their environment, providing a buffer against global uncertainty. Digital infrastructure and mobile-first systems build inclusion and trust, while transparent, data-driven collaboration across borders helps cities pursue sustainable and equitable futures.

The voice of Generation Z added urgency to these discussions. Young participants highlighted mental health, climate anxiety, social exclusion, and lack of representation as defining urban challenges. They called for sports, leisure, and green spaces to be recognized as essential infrastructure and insisted that young people be involved as co-creators of urban policy, not passive beneficiaries.

The first day of the Forum concluded with a collective workshop imagining the City of Well-Being in 2045. Participants applied the Three Horizons framework (Curry & Hodgson. 2008; Sharpe, 2013; Sharpe et al, 2016), a method for understanding and guiding systemic change. The second half of the Forum shifted focus from vision to practice. Strategic foresight became a working tool for cities, illustrated with concrete examples of how anticipation can guide decisions on energy, climate, and long-term investment, as seen in Rotterdam and Geneva. Rather than predicting the future, cities were encouraged to align with change through adaptive governance, following a four-stage framework: Explore, Understand, Frame, and Build.

Reading Future Cities through Three Horizons

The Three Horizons (3H) framework draws on existing systems and structures. It considers different speeds of change, and uses tools and processes designed to support strategic thinking. It views the world in terms of patterns and connects the present with desired (or espoused) futures, identifying divergent futures that may emerge from tensions between the embedded present and imagined future patterns through a systems-thinking approach. 3H divides time into the present, the mid-term, and the long-term, and explores the interactions among the three horizons. It is not a linear roadmap, however: all three horizons are always present and express different ways of acting, each associated with a specific mindset—managerial, visionary and aspirational, and entrepreneurial. Together, they help us become aware of three potentials for action that relate the present to the future, offering a three-dimensional perspective through which to step into a future consciousness.

The first horizon represents the dominant system as it operates today—the current ways of doing things and how they may evolve if we continue acting as we are used to. It includes systems that are “locked-in” and fully integrated: well-established patterns that we intentionally maintain, although they show signs of strain or decline over time.

The third horizon represents the future system, expressing new imaginative ways that may emerge from changing conditions, knowledge, and societal priorities and values. These pathways may better serve emerging needs and opportunities. Transformative change can bring entirely new paths into existence or shift marginal paths into dominance. These paths may be competing, pioneering, or even unrealistic at times, as we build our maps combining our own visions with those of others.

The second horizon is the space where the first and third collide. It is the zone of transition and transformation, where emerging innovations respond to the limits of the first horizon. This horizon challenges assumptions, anticipates future possibilities, and creates pathways that combine action with adaptation. It defines the resources needed to establish ideas in a new world through innovations that are forward-looking rather than constrained by existing systems.

The method unfolds through five interconnected steps that guide exploration of present and future conditions: examining current concerns, envisioning future aspirations, identifying inspirational practices and pockets of the future in the present, considering transitional innovations in play, and preserving essential features of the current system.

The format of the exercise conducted during the 15^th Ljubljana Forum was adjusted to be simplified for the audience and the space of a one hour live-on-stage co-creation session. Underlying was the basic idea that we needed to distill the learnings from a day of insights through identifying what change we actually foresee in our cities by extrapolating from H1. Coupling that with where we want to go, our H3, and exploring how to get there through H2, we tried to make a more actionable output from the day than simply interested discussions. Around 40 participants joined the session, moving from today’s urban pressures to long-term aspirations, and then to the bold shifts that could bridge the gap. The session really wasn’t necessarily about finding polished answers, but rather about surfacing the collective sentiment of the room, hence getting a sense of the mix of optimism and unease, the desire for more respect and resilience, and the recognition that civic capacity, empathy, and foresight could be crucial if we are to create the futures cities of wellbeing we hope to build.

Horizon 1 – Today’s pressures and patterns captured a city system that still “works” in many places, yet feels increasingly overstretched. Participants returned again and again to housing affordability and a cost-of-living squeeze (“skyscraping real-estate prices that never pops”), alongside mobility systems that keep cities car-centric and congested, with infrastructure and energy demands struggling to keep pace. Beneath the physical pressures sat a more emotional diagnosis: mental health strain, loneliness, and a weakening social fabric where people interact less face-to-face and more through “superficial connections”. Governance showed up as a recurring tension too: short election cycles and slow decision-making meeting demands for inclusion, participation, and long-term direction. The overall picture was of more than one single crisis, but more a fragile social contract, where inequality, cultural erosion, and environmental stress accumulate, and where “global cities becoming indistinguishable” signals a loss of local identity even as cities compete on the same template.

Horizon 3 — The ideal city in 2045 shifted the room from critique to desire, and the strongest through-line was respect: for nature, for one another, and for future generations. Many visions described “green and respectful” cities that act as stewards rather than extractors, pairing regeneration with humility and care. A second cluster leaned into inclusive, human-centered living: safe, peaceful, walkable “15-minute” urban life with affordability, greenspace, and social cohesion as non-negotiables. At the same time, the futures were not uniform. Some participants imagined a countercurrent of tradition and slower rhythms, like cities as guardians of belonging, values, and identity in response to perceived cultural erosion. Others deliberately went playful or surreal with it (“free beer”, “plugged into the Matrix”), using provocation (perhaps subconsciously) to question what we normalize today and what we might need to reimagine. Across the utopian and the strange, a practical baseline still surfaced around breathable air, clean water, food security, and safety under climate stress, suggesting that the “ideal city” may be defined in equal measure by resilient basics and visionary form.

Horizon 2 — Leverage points for transition became the bridge: where the room translated pressure and yearning into moves that could plausibly shift the system. What stood out was the dual nature of transition work. Some of the most supported ideas were structural like nature-connected urban living, reforms that redirect education toward care, empathy, and values, and embedding foresight as a civic capability so cities can act proactively rather than reactively. Others were cultural, even behavioral: “more conversations, less screen time” as a direct response to loneliness and frayed trust. A few proposals were more radical and perhaps a sign of the times, like obligatory civic or military service to rebuild solidarity across generations, less as a ready-made policy and more as a signal of how strongly participants felt the need for shared responsibility and lived empathy. Beyond the top-voted items, people named “honest conversations about trade-offs”, modern agoras, risk readiness, “hard empathy”, and open hearts, pointing to a transition agenda that is as much about renewing civic culture as redesigning institutions and infrastructure.

These insights provided raw material for continuing the Forum’s work on a Manifesto, grounding bold visions in the lived concerns and hopes of practitioners. Moreover, the exercise shows the value of foresight methods in urban futures, even one as simple as this: they create a space where imagination and strategy meet, where participants move beyond reacting to today’s crises and start rehearsing tomorrow’s choices. That mindset is exactly what cities will need if they are to anticipate and adapt for the coming decades of change. And, even more importantly, we ended up having a wonderful discussion about the nature of foresight and collective imagination, and between what’s ideal for some, might not be for others. But at the end of the day, we need spaces and places like this to deliberate about these topics instead of being suppressed in the face of what’s generally perceived more urgent, i.e. present day challenges.

A manifesto for Futures Cities

The Ljubljana Forum 2025 concluded with a strong, forward-looking message that brought together 15 years of experience, innovation, and collaboration among city leaders, urban planners, futurists, businesses, NGOs, governments, and EU institutions. The Forum reaffirmed the priority of moving from vision to action, integrating foresight and planning into concrete projects that position cities as platforms for multidimensional well-being, encompassing physical, social, economic, and environmental health. It underlined the need to strengthen collaboration across stakeholders, involve youth and new generations in decision-making, and support sustainable urban projects through innovative financing that combine different funds. Conclusions also emphasized the role of local identity in building resilience and highlighted the importance of global cooperation and solidarity.

The conclusions of the Ljubljana Forum 2025 were further articulated through the Ljubljana Forum Manifesto 2025, built around three guiding principles:

• Act Together emphasizes multi-stakeholder cooperation among city leaders, experts, businesses, and citizens, promoting inclusive, transparent, and participatory urban governance based on shared responsibility to define common interest on specific challenge;

• Plan Ahead focuses on strategic foresight and long-term planning to anticipate challenges such as climate change, economic uncertainty, and demographic change, calling for data-driven and anticipatory governance to become proactive;

• Deliver Well-Being highlights the translation of vision into tangible outcomes, stressing that technology must serve humanity by supporting social inclusion, health, sustainability, and equity.

Together, these principles form a call to action inviting cities to implement the Manifesto through pilot projects, foresight labs, and inter-city cooperation networks, and defining a forward-looking European model of the City of Well-Being guided by strategic foresight and centered on people, communities, and nature.

With approximately 960 cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants across Europe—representing 75% of the population and spanning 39 countries, including the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and Turkey—the Ljubljana Forum Manifesto 2025 sends a clear call to action to all European cities. It invites them to bridge planning and anticipation, co-create a European Model of the City of Well-Being, and build urban systems that are coherent, inclusive, and forward-looking. Its three guiding principles define a new urban ethics: cities must think holistically, ensure that no one is left behind, and prepare for the future before crises emerge.

The Manifesto is more than a declaration; it is a roadmap for action. Through city foresight labs, collaborative pilot projects, and EU-wide cooperation networks, it aims to turn vision into tangible projects, foresight into policy, and ideals into lived experience. By 2045, cities can become not only sustainable but deeply humane places where technology, nature, and people coexist in coherence, inclusion, and anticipation. This, the Forum argues, is Europe’s unique contribution to the world: cities that care, connect, and shape the future together for people and nature.

Save the date for October 2-3, 2026 at Ljubljana Castle and discover what challenges, ideas, and innovations will shape this year’s Forum!