Placemaking Week Europe 2026

Name: European best practices in Place Led Development: Nordsø Copenhagen and Kenniskwartier Tilburg
Start: 2026-09-23T14:30:00+0200
End: 2026-09-23T15:45:00+0200

Creating better cities together.

European best practices in Place Led Development: Nordsø Copenhagen and Kenniskwartier Tilburg

Wednesday September 23, 2026 2:30pm - 3:45pm CEST

Fred Kent Room - Wroclaw Congress Center (RCTB)

This session is hosted by the Place Led Development Group of Placemaking Europe and the ULI Europe Placemaking Council.

With the Place Led Development Group, we have been documenting the best practices of area development that revolve around community and place, and thereby aim to learn for new area developments. We have been documenting Europe's best cases since five years now.

In this session, we will introduce Place-Led Development, the ULI Placemaking Council and then dive into two exciting new cases to be added to our list:
1. Nordsø is a project of Volcano in collaboration with the City and the Port of Copenhagen. Nordsø is located in Nordhavn and is one of the biggest development projects in Denmark ever. Volcano uses alternative tools for engaging citizens as Urban Safaris, a Summit (festival), Pop-up dialogs, and digital involvement. They are creating an open and transparent process and are supporting the projects DGNB Platin-certification.
2. Kenniskwartier in Tilburg will add 7,500 new homes to this city in the south of The Netherlands. The aim is not only to add houses, but mix with work and amenities. The new housing will be 70% affordable, in a neighbourhood that has a lot of social housing already. This requires the work profile to be very inclusive (including neighbourhood economy, manufacturing), the social quality to be very high (social amenities) and a social innovation aim (culture, creativity, young professional startups). These cannot pay the high prize real estate developers normally ask, and therefore STIPO and the City of Tilburg are organising an Eye Level Curation Organisation, an entirely new innovation that will curate around 80,000 m2 of work and amenity space in order to be inclusive and vibrant.

After the introductions we will discuss with the audience what this means for the values of future place led development projects.

Both Volcano and STIPO have been involved in place led development projects throughout Europe for more than 30 years.

Speakers