Urbanism is not uniform. Understanding how CityChangers work at various scales is fundamental to forming communities that pull together to advance change that benefits everyone.
At what scale does an urban change-maker work?
Knowing the answer to this question has many benefits for those of us who believe that cities can be better places. More equitable, sustainable, and liveable.
This can reveal to us, for example, what people believe can be improved, and where to target messages to best engage and motivate communities. Or it can provide the basis for new partnerships, by finding practitioners working at the same level or experts who operate across different scales, with whom it could be useful to join forces.
Just as important in knowing if there are patterns relating to scale where change-makers do not work, creating chances to identify and so plug the gaps.
That’s why internationally renowned architect and urban planner Honorata Grzesikowska didn’t turn down the perfect opportunity to ask the question when change-makers gathered at the Urban Future conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
As a habitual researcher, she wanted to find out whether there are commonalities particularly in the scale at which attendees to the event operate – those who share a mindset, if not a discipline.
A Spot of Research
Urban Future attracts a myriad of folks who come from all corners of the globe to share their experiences of how they are improving their city.
The 2026 event brought together around 2,000 urbanists of all kinds: mayors, academics, urban designers, city planners, housing groups, international foundations, architects, ecological advocates, students, policy writers, place makers, activists, artists, and of course representatives from municipal departments. What could be a more ideal setting for Honorata to try out her impromptu one-minute interviews?
It must be said, this was the most informal research Honorata has conducted, as much a fun activity to spark conversation as it was to ascertain robust data, but useful all the same. Dressed in a graffitied trench coat and armed with panels depicting different scales of the city, Honorata prowled the conference centre during the breaks, and posed her question at random:
In your work, which scale of the built environment do you influence most?
Responders were asked to choose a single option out of six:
Examining the Answers
The spot interviews revealed three interesting findings:
- CityChangers often view their work as spanning more than one scale
- The lower and upper scales at which people believe they influence ranges further than the options presented
- Scales are in fact three-dimensional, not lineal, with some change-makers’ work having simultaneous knock-on impacts in areas outside of the location or scale at which they are primarily focused
From up-and-coming young professionals to practitioners with decades of experience, it was common that people struggled to commit to a single answer.
Looking into the individual responses gives a more nuanced picture.
Local Level Anomalies
Among the most decisive was co-founder of Humankind, Lior Steinberg. As a city planner, it’s somewhat surprising that out of anyone he could pinpoint his impact to a particular scale. “I have to admit that it’s probably the street scale,” he said. “Most of the projects that we’re doing are very local.”
Another participant – a student – made a unique and pertinent observation. Her focus is on streets, she says, but for developers in the private realm. So rather than the street scale, which Honorata’s graphic defines as the public realm, she felt obliged to opt for the site-specific level – two scales larger.
This CityChanger was joined by a couple of people who work for municipal departments. Honorata observed that responders in this kind of position tend to have a pronounced tilt towards the city and regional scales. There’s logic to this, she reasons, as people are paid to serve an authority within a defined geographical boundary. “It’s easy to reply if you are in a municipality.”
Pan-Scale Perspectives
It is striking how penned-in most people felt by having to choose a single scale.
Bruno Doedens is the land artist and landscape architect behind the 100-day walking forest project, which saw a living forest of 1,200 mobile trees gradually move through Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. He claims that his greening initiatives span every scale. “I need [to say] them all, because I touch people with their heart on this level,” he says pointing to the street scale, before adding that his projects also bring people together at all the others: “And I use imagination to also connect the world, to shape cities, to bring it together with daily life.”
David Sim thought similarly. “What I’ve learned is that everything is connected.” He clarifies that people active at the largest scale also “need to understand” what’s happening at street level and everywhere in between.
Known for his work on “soft cities”, David cites his personal influence as in the “middle”, the site and neighbourhood scales. But he says he considers the impacts across the whole, walking it through in his mind: starting with a room in an apartment, moving to the yard, down the alley that links to a road, through the town square to a transport hub, and beyond. “It is about the flow, up and down. It’s constantly connected.”
Off the Scale!
The conversations also revealed scales that Honorata did not foresee, and so would have otherwise been missed.
Placemaking expert Ethan Kent reframed the plot level (second smallest) as “the destinations scale”, explaining that his work takes place in the spaces between buildings – a relevant distinction overlooked in the six options presented.
Urban planner and researcher Alexander Ståhle asked whether there could be a more granular choice than that of Honorata’s smallest option, the street level. Urban Future co-founder, Josephine Yilan Liu proposed this could be addressed by adding a panel for “the fundamental scale”. This alludes to a cognitive layer, where changes to the physical environment and human behaviour co-exist, even if the latter is not in itself tangible. As Josephine explains, at this level “we don’t really have influence, we integrate”.
Going Global
At the other extreme, one of the first CityChangers with whom Honorata spoke mentioned the lack of a global scale. This was raised time and again.
Master planner Carlo Castelli added that those working in policy innovation might identify with the slightly more manageable national scale – another not represented in the panels.
An unidentified woman who joined him for the discussion explained that she works for a “global funder looking at how we decarbonise the built environment” (likely the Laudes Foundation). Although the organisation theoretically has a worldwide reach, she says that her work is felt regionally, “because that’s the focus of our strategies”. Her colleague expands on this idea, saying that their reach is spread so far and wide, that it actually changes the bigger picture.
Their slightly different takes on the work of the same team raises the question of unintentional bias; how perception skews the results of such an informal, qualitative research method.
Age & Gender
Urban Future welcomes people at all stages of their flurry into urbanism. Honorata quizzed a bunch of young people to see if their perspectives differed from the seasoned pros. Responses were fairly consistent.
One, a mobility planner who works “a lot” with “transportation master plans for cities” regards their work as having municipal-wide or regional significance, but most accurately on the city scale.
There was a student currently “doing an internship in a circular economy sustainability consultancy” who finds themselves working on “a lot of projects within regional scale countries within Europe, developing circular strategies for them… yeah, national policies”.
Another young person starts by saying that she works for an architecture studio. “I’m building digital tools for researching public spaces.” She explains that these apply across the plot, site, and neighbourhood scales – an answer shared by a young female “urbanist in the city of Amsterdam at the municipality”. It appears that scale is no more heavily defined by working in the public or private sectors.
In the same group, a young woman identified as “Juliana” introduces herself as an architect and urban designer, “but I currently work in a landscape architecture office, so I mostly work on the public realm.” That’s the smallest scale.
An onlooker observed out loud how there is a clear distinction between the answers given by men and women in this group – with female CityChangers working at smaller scales, and men tending to gravitate towards the larger realms. There’s potential here for a formal study into whether this is a common pattern, and what might cause it. Based on her research into the gendered impacts of urban design, though, Honorata hypothesises that this is a reflection of women being humbler about the extent of their influence, and men overstating theirs.
Peripheral Change-makers
What about those who touch on the urban realm in more abstract ways? At what scale do they have an influence?
Tanisha Raffiuddin presents the Talking Place webcast, which she tells Honorata touches people as far and wide as possible. “My podcast reaches more than 50 countries across the world. Whether they’re acting on what they’re listening to is a different thing, but I know that they’re listening.”
And what about Urban Future itself – how do members of the team behind the conference view their contribution to urbanism? The three who took part each had a different perspective.
Head of communications, Lisa Marie Weber: “Yeah, I think that Urban Future has the strongest connections in the cities directly, whether it’s with architects or urban planners or whoever.” That’s the penultimate largest scale Honorata offered.
Paula Rubene is in charge of speaker management: “I would have said the globe because we have people from all around, over 90 countries. I think people are here from 250 cities.” Many of them will return home more informed, equipped to start a change, Paula believes.
Editor in chief, Karl Dickinson sees it differently: “But we start the domino chain.” Based on this reasoning, he thinks that Urban Future impacts the neighbourhood scale. Not because this is where the majority of the organisation’s work is concentrated, but with so many of the stories that feature on CityChangers.org touching the street level, it’s difficult not to view the impact as bottom-up.
Complications for Communications
Communicators are the supporting cast in the world of change. Platforms like CityChangers.org fill an important role in disseminating the knowledge gained by the people who do the doing; sharing it for others to learn from, and possibly replicate, thereby accelerating further impact.
Understanding at which scale change-makers are active theoretically helps communicators pinpoint what stories to tell, helping to keep motivation afloat. Except the ambiguity in responses suggests that anything goes – we shouldn’t limit our outlook.
The research this time is inconclusive. It did not find people more active at any one scale over any of the others. If anything, it shows that scale is difficult to define, and that there’s a larger spectrum to urban transformation than we may realise, ranging from the metaphysical of cognitive processes to the global reach.
There’s More to Come…
But this activity wasn’t supposed to lead to a definite conclusion, rather shine a light on the different ways urbanists are thinking about their cities and acting on those ideas. The results from Honorata’s flash interviews suggest that there will be people who relate to stories at all levels, so it’s up to communicators to decide on a case by case basis where to focus their energies, whether to specialise in scale(s) and exclude people working at others or serve the full spectrum of interests and dilute the intensity. It’s hard to say whether either choice is good or bad.
What we know for sure is that, if we decide to exclude any scale, we are in danger of missing opportunities to holistically improve cities. Because, ultimately, if urban spaces are to become the best they can be, change is needed at every level that urbanists touch.
David Sim may have summed it up best when he quoted former colleague, Danish architect Jan Gehl. “Jan said something really smart,” he recalls. “He said, ‘How do we do regional planning at eye level?’” In other words, how do we combine the micro and macro scales?
What the two thousand people at Urban Future might say is, “How do we change the entire world beginning with just a single thought?” The answer is collectively.
And what does Honorata think about all this?
“To be continued,” she says, suggesting she’ll be asking more people at UF27 in Istanbul the same question, but with a bigger scope for them to choose from.