HAPPENING 28–29 MAY 2026 | What does a better city actually look like, and who gets to shape it? Utopian Hours brings bold urban ideas to Rotterdam, turning city-making into a shared conversation about space, climate, culture, and everyday life.
Rotterdam is set to host part one of the 10th edition on 28 and 29 May 2026, with the anniversary edition split across two cities. Part two follows in Turin on 16 and 17 October 2026.
What Utopian Hours is actually about
Utopian Hours calls itself an international festival of city-making, and that word “festival” is doing real work here. This is not just another urban conference with a logo wall and a polite panel about “innovation”. Utopian Hours is built around big urban questions, strong opinions, and practical case studies, mixing keynotes, conversations, and workshop-style formats aimed at the people who actually shape cities, from designers and planners to policymakers, organisers, investors, and local “doers”.
At its core, Utopian Hours is about how cities get made, and who gets to shape them. The festival frames “city-making” as a mix of planning, politics, culture, architecture, and civic energy. The official festival description puts the emphasis on ideas, projects, and places shaping the future of cities, and it regularly clusters its programme around themes like climate adaptation, mobility, urban ecology, social innovation, placemaking, and emerging tech in urban life.
One helpful way to think of it: if you care about how Rotterdam deals with heat, water, density, liveability, public space, and the push-and-pull between bold building plans and street-level reality, this is the kind of event where those conversations happen at a high level, but with real examples.
Why Rotterdam makes sense as a host city
The Rotterdam hosting story is being positioned as a partnership involving the City of Rotterdam, Rotterdam Partners, and Groot Handelsgebouw, with the festival using the city as a real-world backdrop for discussions about urban life.
There is also a long-running connection between Rotterdam-based urban thinkers and the festival. Rotterdam’s announcement mentions names like Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Dirk van Peijpe (De Urbanisten) as examples of people from the city who have appeared in the Utopian Hours orbit.
International coverage also highlights Rotterdam’s post-war rebuilding and its ongoing experimentation in architecture and planning as a good match for an event that is supposed to be both visionary and grounded in real urban trade-offs.
What we know about the Rotterdam edition so far
The dates and the hosting news have been announced, at the programme details are still to come. Here is what is currently known:
- Dates: Thursday 28 and Friday 29 May 2026.
- Edition: Part one of the 10th anniversary edition, with part two later in Turin (16–17 October 2026).
- Venue: Groot Handelsgebouw (next to Rotterdam Centraal).
- Positioning: Europe-focused city-making and urban vision, bringing together international city-makers and urban professionals.
Who should care, even if you are not an urban planner
If you are in Rotterdam and you work anywhere near the city’s “future stuff”, this festival is relevant. That includes:
- architects, designers, and urbanists (obvious)
- climate and water people (very Rotterdam)
- civic organisers, cultural producers, and neighbourhood initiatives
- policymakers and public-sector teams
- entrepreneurs working on mobility, public space, housing, or city tech
And if you are simply the kind of resident who likes knowing where the next big debate is happening, it is also a neat signal: Rotterdam is still being used as a European test case city in the international imagination.
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