Rotterdam to Co-Host Utopian Hours Festival 2026
Rotterdam will take center stage in May 2026 as the co-host city for the 10th edition of Utopian Hours, Europe’s leading festival on urban vision and city-making. The announcement was made during this year’s edition in Turin, where Rotterdam’s strong connection to the festival was once again on display. This milestone marks a joint effort between the City of Rotterdam, Rotterdam Partners, and the Groot Handelsgebouw, who will together welcome city changemakers, urban professionals, and policymakers from around the world next spring.
About Utopian Hours
The Utopian Hours festival is dedicated to city-making, uncovering the ideas, projects, and places that are shaping the future of cities worldwide. As Europe’s leading event for city makers, it brings together world-class architects, urban planners, policymakers, designers, and businesses to explore new developments, innovations, challenges, and opportunities in modern urban life.
Utopian Hours finds its stage in Rotterdam
Bold, innovative, and resilient, Rotterdam embodies the spirit of Utopian Hours. From 28–29 May 2026, the city will host the part one of the 10th edition of the festival, offering the ideal setting for global conversations about the future of urban life. Renowned for its forward-thinking approach to sustainability, architecture, infrastructure and urban planning, the city offers the ideal setting for global conversations about the future of urban life. Rising from post-war reconstruction to become a world leader in sustainable urban design, Rotterdam continues to turn challenges like climate adaptation and flood resilience into groundbreaking solutions that inspire cities worldwide.
"From the beginning, Utopian Hours has positioned itself as a festival that celebrates cities and urban innovation with an attractive and accessible language, a multidisciplinary, inventive format open to bold ideas. Rotterdam is the European city that has stood out over the years for its attitude to experimentation and the pursuit of new city-making solutions. Bringing the festival to this city is an extraordinary achievement for Stratosferica. Collaborating with the City of Rotterdam and local partners, we will reach out to a larger international audience and bring to the festival stage the insights and emotions of placemakers, creatives, activists, entrepreneurs, investors, city officials, and designers who passionately strive to transform their own city from across the globe."
- Luca Ballarini, Founder & Creative Director of Stratosferica.
"Rotterdam is a city of makers: bold enough to experiment, resilient enough to rebuild, and inclusive enough to co-create. As the Netherlands’ capital of architecture, it blends visionary urban planning with grassroots energy, shaping a metropolis that’s constantly reinventing itself. We’re glad to collaborate with Utopian Hours in leading the Urban Climate Resilience working table, a dialogue dedicated to adaptation, mitigation, and risk reduction strategies."
Melany van Twuijver, City of Rotterdam
Conversations on the urban future
Rotterdam and Utopian Hours have long been connected through a shared vision of shaping better cities. This ongoing collaboration has seen Rotterdam-based creatives take center stage at the festival year after year. Renowned architects and urban thinkers such as Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Dirk van Peijpe (De Urbanisten) have brought Rotterdam’s forward-thinking spirit to the event, inspiring audiences with bold ideas and transformative urban concepts. This year’s edition continued that tradition, featuring some of the world’s most prominent voices in urban design including Elizabeth Diller, Winy Maas, David West, and Mikael Colville-Andersen.
Rotterdam collaborations
In recent years Rotterdam has proven increasingly popular as city of urban innovation. Year on year more people visit the city to explore its architectural diversity and creative urban planning. Besides tourists, Rotterdam is also attracting conferences and business events on urban planning related topics, (such as Urban Future 2024, Swimmable Cities 2025, International Conference on Urban Climate 2025), a result of continued efforts and collaborations of many partners in the city, including the municipality, knowledge institutes, architecture firms and many others. For Utopian Hours, City of Rotterdam, Rotterdam Partners and Jamestown worked closely together with International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Independent School for the City, AFFR, and Rotterdam Weatherwise in bringing the event to Rotterdam.
