Congress 2025 - Utrecht: Healthy Urban Living

Good urbanism focuses on places. Great urbanism focuses on people. The AoU’s Congress in Utrecht is your opportunity to explore how the city is making Healthy Urban Living a reality.

Capitalising on its heritage and location, the city is the fastest growing in the Netherlands. Yet it is the everyday that defines Utrecht’s urbanism. The city is home to one of the world’s busiest cycleways and, where a motorway once covered a historic canal, goods are now transported once more by water into the city core and people gather by the water’s edge. New neighbourhoods have social infrastructure at their core, and retrofitting old buildings for new uses is a given.

Challenges remain, recognisable in many other cities, but Utrecht’s placemaking approach to these new challenges is built on the confidence of how it addressed its past ones.

Join us in Utrecht, 11 – 13 June 2025, where we will investigate these themes through a programme of site visits, workshops, and talks from local and international experts, including this year’s keynote speakers Carolyn Steel, Jan Vapaavuori and Karin Huber-Heim.