When Mannheim’s mobility trial failed spectacularly, the municipality learnt that the true power to transform a city comes from engaging stakeholders right from the start.
Some of the best ideas emerge from the most unexpected constellations. One mild September afternoon in 2025, five hundred people sat down at Kapuzinerplanken in Mannheim, Germany, to share a lunch made from three tonnes of “rescued food” – that so close to its sell by date that it was destined for landfill.
Food waste is one of the most common carbon emitters, so the rescued food lunch did its bit to reduce Mannheim’s footprint that day. The idea was concocted a few months earlier by a group of local CityChangers as they travelled home from the Urban Future Conference in Łódź, Poland – an event which has hosted similar dinners before. During the journey, Friedel Goetz, a young pastor, suggested that a rescued food lunch could also be a good way of bringing the people of Mannheim together.
The plan immediately resonated with the group, which included a business developer, a local real estate mogul, and the Mayor’s City Centre Commissioner, Petar Drakul. By the time they arrived, the four of them had already made the first phone calls to potential partners; between them, they had enough influence to secure the use of public space in which to host the meal, and kitchens of nearby restaurants to prepare it.
United By a Fresh Idea
The Mannheim team set up tables in the street and invited everyone to eat – for free – attracting a “fantastic” mix of people from affluent shoppers to rough sleepers. He recalls looking on happily as they chatted in a city where loneliness is a major problem, which he partly attributes to “more than 60% of the population living in single-person households”. Germany’s rising anti-immigration sentiment is also aggravating division in this cultural melting pot where a similar number “of the inhabitants in the city centre have roots in a foreign country”. Over dinner, these tensions seemed to evaporate.
This unity, and having a place to test new ideas, is what is “so important about city centres,” Petar believes.
A Turnaround in Fortunes
The positivity felt at the rescued food lunch was the good news story that Mannheim needed. Three years earlier, a failed attempt to transform the inner city had already stretched the city’s sense of cohesion.
It should have been so very different. Mannheim is home to roughly 320,000 permanent residents, and is the main retail centre for the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region – a catchment of a staggering 2.5 million. Petar says that this attracts 11 million pedestrians annually, making Mannheim city centre a thriving place to be, but this is changing.
Heat is a major problem. In the city centre, around 86% of the land is sealed, rising to as much as 96% in the core retail district. These surfaces reflect and amplify heat. Summer temperatures can linger at 30°C even at midnight, making life extremely uncomfortable. Further out – where there’s almost five times more tree canopy on average – it peaks at a much cooler 22°C. But as average temperatures creep up in line with Europe’s hotter summers, visitor numbers are declining in the centre. When the city organised a festival in June 2025 offering music, family activities, and prizes, the mercury hit 35 degrees; hardly anyone came.
Change by Demand
Petar explains that the city administration felt “a high pressure to transform” the downtown area. In a survey conducted in 2023, 4,000 respondents cited heat among the top priorities they wanted resolved. It also revealed that “people don’t like cars,” which significantly contribute to the heat issue, so this seemed to be an obvious starting point for change.
They say, ‘Please move the cars out of the city centre.’
In 2022, the city administration had already taken the first step towards improving the area by launching a mobility trial. Through traffic was redirected to reduce unnecessary traffic, to make room in Fressgasse for urban greening, and to improve the public space. Despite these worthy ambitions, the project encountered fierce opposition from across the city.
“A Complete Mess”
Everyone seemed to share the same criticism but were somehow at the same time at each other’s throats – civil society, the Chamber of Commerce, neighbourhood associations, the city administration, businesses, creatives, policymakers, and architects. “Everyone was frustrated,” Petar remembers. He counted more than 300 negative newspaper articles and letters to the editor about it. Social media was ablaze with vitriol.
Redirected traffic caused severe congestion on one residential street, where traffic jams frequently continued well into the night. “The people living on that street suffered a lot,” Petar admits.
“It was a complete mess,” he explains. Local businesses complained that the city centre was “unreachable” without car access. Customers threatened to shop elsewhere in protest. These weren’t empty threats: visitor numbers did decline. “When the message is, ‘You can’t reach a city,’ people stay away.”
Business owners were up in arms. Three hundred of them signed a petition, demanding their car parking spaces be restored and the planters that replaced them removed, despite them being rally “pretty”, according to Petar.
Nothing the city administration tried would have been right, all because they didn’t involve stakeholders from the start.
Restless Stakeholders Make Unlikely Allies
Failing to include people in shaping solutions is not the same as ignoring them altogether. The City of Mannheim had, Petar says, communicated the mobility trial widely through newspaper articles, social media, and paid advertisements in the local press, but it still seemed to catch most people by surprise when construction began. “You know how it is. If you make an announcement, nobody cares. But the moment somebody starts breaking up the asphalt and concrete, people get very vocal.” Looking back, Petar understands why. “They are afraid of losing everything” that’s familiar to them.
But businesses were not just a vocal pain in the side. They got organised, which actually offered a glimmer of hope to those who saw it this way.
“They wrote us a paper with 10 bullet points” to say that they “are also interested in developing the inner city,” Petar explains, revealing they did not oppose change generally.
Even if a handful were unachievable or required federal or state involvement – and so beyond Mannheim’s remit – a couple of their points were worth considering. Two years after the trial, Petar invited their representatives to work with him on drafting a way forward. “That was a game changer. They were so lovely, and they were really fighting for a better inner city.”
FutuRaum
Petar had formed a new stakeholder working group of 30+ representatives called the City Factory, part of the FutuRaum initiative that the mayor assigned him to lead as part of Mannheim’s new stakeholder-led agenda.
Translated to “Future Space” from the German, FutuRaum is a participatory project that puts the public at the centre of decisions about their city. Its role is to connect people, he explains, and act as a facilitator of urban development, built on a three-pronged strategy: citizen participation, stakeholder activation, and city administration.
City Factory is part of stakeholder activation and “vital” for bringing together a diverse range of local players. “If they work with you, it’s a great thing,” Petar says, as it’s everyday citizens that “can tell you what is important”.
Involving the most vulnerable neighbourhoods is a must, he adds, having learnt from one particular encounter that has stayed with him. At the opening of a “wonderful” new playground in a neighbourhood close to the city centre, a resident told him how disappointed she felt that her community had been overlooked by the city administration throughout its development. “The mayor has to come and talk to us,” he recalls her saying. Looking back, Petar realised what she meant: “We had transformed the centre of the neighbourhood, but it had not involved her.” It’s often exclusion, not the ideas themselves, that cause conflict.
Turning Conflict into Change
If any good came out of the disastrous mobility trial, it’s that the city administration got to know who the relevant stakeholders are. So, it was easy enough to invite them to participate. And although the various groups had not seen eye to eye before, “No one was really interested in more conflicts. In the end everyone knew we needed to change [the process] together,” Petar tells us.
In a series of productive workshops, stakeholders were asked what they wanted the future of the city centre to look like. Those present did something radical: they listened to one another. “People got the chance to see the city through the eyes of the man or woman who was talking about his or her visions and this created empathy.” That seemed to heal old wounds, and conflict was replaced with cooperation.
In total, they discussed more than 300 proposals, testing the viability of each against three straightforward and transparent criteria:
- Public value – will it add worth to the city? Is it realistic? “If you can’t explain it, forget it!”
- Operational capacity – can it be achieved within the available budget?
- Legitimacy and support – does it have support from the mayor? If there is significant opposition from key stakeholders, think twice before moving forward.
Many ideas, it turns out, were inspired by places like Amsterdam and Barcelona, where people had been impressed by the cycling infrastructure and vehicle-restricting superblocks, showing how on point the mobility trial really had been.
A Successful Second Implementation
Together, the group devised a shared vision from shortlisted proposals, which were all passed by the city council “with a huge majority”. This laid foundations for “developing the inner city centre step by step”, including the same 700 metre-long stretch of road where the mobility trial had taken place.
Had it gone ahead, the combined project would have required approximately €2 million in local investment from the city, complemented by a further €6 million in state funding. But the plans stalled when Mannheim was “hit by a budget crisis – like most cities in Germany today,” our CityChanger explains.
But this time round it was different. The community, having been involved in the plan from the start, was hungry for change. So much so that some took on responsibility for it.
On 09 August 2025, the Mannheimer Morgen reported how eight businesses on the main shopping street had reused a bunch of planters previously used at Mannheim’s Federal Garden Show (BUGA) and have committed to their upkeep for at least two years. Interest from other businesses is growing, too, as they credit the greening initiative as making the area more attractive and therefore boosting trade.
All it took from the municipality was an initial investment of just €11,000 of federal funding sourced through FutuRaum to depave 80m2 of sealed road, where the planters replaced nine parking spaces.
Just the Start
Petar says that there were “only good vibes” this time, and the ideas keep coming. Other approved initiatives include a competition encouraging owners of Mannheim’s buildings to add vegetation to their facades, and the erection of green shading structures, co-created by the city museum and local restaurants.
There has also been a push on the creative use of underused public and indoor spaces for cultural purposes. Jazz concerts, art installations, and fashion shows are being held in unconventional locations such as rooftops, hotels, and department stores after opening hours, bringing life into the city centre during parts of the day that would normally have been deserted. One event saw 500 people lingering in the streets long after shops had shut.
And, of course, there was the rescued food lunch.
It’s important to have imagination. If you use public space in a new way, you develop a new feeling for public space.
Understanding & Activation
There is still much that can be done in Mannheim, Petar says, although the ongoing budget issue causes delays. But the biggest victory of all is that the city now has a tried and tested method for addressing its issues in a way that meets minimum resistance.
“The main result is not that we change some parking lots into green space or make green facades or have some new shops,” Petar explains. “The process is much more important than individual measures. The main thing is that we have shown how urban transformation can be achieved by [the] people.”
And that’s the goal: for positive change to occur, people must be empowered to drive it forward, and may even share in the responsibility of implementing and maintaining it. “Participation is important, asking what people think of your ideas. But activation is better because then people will take ownership of the project. If they’ve got ownership, you win.”
That’s not to say that the public should be handed full responsibility, and the authorities should wash their hands of it: the magic really happens when stakeholders and the city work together. Overlooking this point is why the original mobility trial collapsed. “We didn’t understand the people, and understanding starts when you know what the problems are.”
For Petar, this experience offers a possible blueprint for a different approach to urban transformation. The value of this, he hopes, will be recognised and applied more widely in Mannheim in the future, and take his final piece of advice into account too: “Start with the problems, not the solutions.”