63rd IMCL Conference Ends on a Hopeful Note
- Michael Mehaffy
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Attendees recognize challenges, but also note significant progress in making cities livable and sustainable in a time of disruption
ABOVE: A group of attendees gathers in the courtyard of the beautiful Jelgava Palace, the primary host venue of the 63rd IMCL Conference.
JELGAVA AND RIGA, LATVIA - The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) Conference has just concluded here, bringing together an intimate gathering of urban leaders, researchers, architects, planners, and practitioners from around the world, to confront one of the most urgent questions of our time: how can cities and towns recover, adapt, and regenerate under disruptive social, economic and technological forces?
Hosted in the historic cities of Riga and Jelgava, the conference theme — “Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption” — reflected a sobering reality. Cities today face overlapping challenges: climate change, social fragmentation, housing crises, economic uncertainty, geopolitical conflict, and the continuing impacts of rapid and sometimes destabilizing technological change.
Yet the message emerging from Latvia was not one of despair. Instead, participants found remarkable examples of courage, creativity, and renewal, and powerful reminders that cities have always been places where human communities come together to solve problems, rebuild, and create better futures.
The conference opened in Riga City Hall with presentations from the city’s leadership, including City Architect Pēteris Ratas and Deputy Mayor Māris Sprindzuks. Participants were welcomed not only into a beautiful historic European capital, but into an active conversation about the city’s future — how its remarkable heritage can continue to serve as a foundation for innovation, sustainability, and quality of life.
Riga itself provided a living classroom. Its extraordinary urban fabric — from medieval streets and squares to its celebrated Art Nouveau districts and contemporary regeneration efforts — illustrated one of the conference’s central themes: that the most successful cities are not static artifacts, but living systems. They adapt, evolve, and regenerate over time.
ABOVE: City Architect Pēteris Ratas welcomes attendees and gives an overview of the City's work.
Attendees then participated in study tours of Riga, including its splendid Art Nouveau district, and its sobering Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. The first day concluded with a reception at the spectacular House of the Blackheads, where attendees and city officials were joined by the Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia, Mr. Artom Uršulskis.
The next morning, the group toured the spectacular Riga Central Market, one of the world's largest covered markets with over 700,000 square feet of space and over 3,000 stalls. The group heard about the history of the market and its vendors, and
ABOVE: One of the five pavilions of the Riga Central Market, built from converted zeppelin hangars in the 1920s during Latvia's first Republic.
The discussion continued in Jelgava, where the Chair of the Council (Mayor), Mārtiņš Daģis, joined other city development officials, municipal staff, and officials of the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies, to provide exceptional hospitality, facilities, and support for conference participants. Jelgava’s own story — a city shaped by destruction, reconstruction, and renewal — offered a compelling context for exploring how communities can recover from disruption while preserving identity and strengthening resilience.
ABOVE: Participants examine conference workshop results for the regeneration of Jelgava neighborhoods.
Participants engaged directly with local challenges, including the regeneration of post-war urban environments, the improvement of public spaces, and the transformation of existing buildings and neighborhoods into healthier, more connected places. Rather than treating these challenges as merely technical problems, the discussions emphasized the social and cultural dimensions of regeneration: how places support community, belonging, memory, and everyday life.
A particularly powerful dimension of the conference was the participation of representatives from Ukraine, including the Deputy Mayor of Kyiv, Kostiantyn Usov. At a time when Ukrainian cities face unimaginable pressures from war and destruction, the discussions highlighted both the immediate challenges of reconstruction and the deeper questions of what kind of cities should emerge afterward.
In such cases, the goal cannot simply be to rebuild what was lost. It must be to regenerate — to create places that are stronger, healthier, more beautiful, more resilient, and more supportive of human flourishing.
This message was echoed by many participants working directly with affected communities. Susan Henderson of PlaceMakers LLC, who has been collaborating with communities in the Lviv region of Ukraine, reflected on the extraordinary resilience she has witnessed among residents living through conditions of profound stress and uncertainty. She noted that the determination, creativity, and commitment of city residents themselves are not only inspiring today — they are a profound source of hope for the future.
That observation captured a recurring theme of the conference: resilience is not simply a property of infrastructure, technology, or institutions. It begins with people. Cities endure because people care for them. They recover because residents maintain relationships, traditions, knowledge, and shared commitments. The physical city — its streets, buildings, public spaces, neighborhoods, and landscapes — can either strengthen those connections or weaken them.
This understanding points toward a broader transformation now occurring in urban thinking. For much of the last century, cities were often treated as machines: systems to be optimized through separation, specialization, and top-down planning. Today, a growing body of research and practice recognizes cities as complex living systems — networks of relationships among people, places, cultures, economies, and ecosystems.
Regenerative urbanism builds from that understanding. It asks not only how we can reduce harm, but how we can restore and strengthen the conditions that allow communities to thrive.
Throughout the conference, participants presented inspiring examples from many parts of the world: projects restoring historic neighborhoods, creating more walkable and connected communities, improving public spaces, addressing climate adaptation, supporting social inclusion, and developing new tools for collaborative planning.
Another recurring theme throughout the conference was the importance of learning from the accumulated wisdom embodied in the world's successful towns and cities, and in their detailed urban patterns and spatial logics. Participants emphasized that traditional urbanism is not simply a matter of preserving historic buildings or replicating old architectural styles. Rather, historic cities embody generations of practical experimentation—what might be called embodied intelligence—about how human settlements can best support health, sociability, resilience, commerce, and everyday life. Conference participants argued that understanding these enduring patterns allows us to move forward more intelligently, adapting proven principles to meet contemporary challenges while avoiding the costly mistakes that have too often accompanied twentieth-century models of urban development.
The diversity of examples reinforced an important lesson: there is no single formula for creating livable cities. Successful solutions emerge from careful attention to local conditions — climate, culture, history, ecology, and the needs and aspirations of residents themselves.
At the same time, common patterns appeared again and again. People need access to welcoming public spaces. They need neighborhoods where daily life can unfold conveniently and safely. They need buildings and streets that support health, interaction, beauty, and a sense of belonging. They need the ability to participate meaningfully in shaping the places they call home.
The setting of Latvia offered a particularly powerful reminder of these lessons. Riga and Jelgava are cities that have experienced profound historical disruptions — war, occupation, political transformation, and economic change. Yet they also demonstrate the remarkable capacity of cities and cultures to endure, adapt, and renew themselves.
Their experience has special relevance today, as communities around the world face their own forms of disruption. The challenges differ, but the underlying questions are similar: How do we preserve what is valuable while adapting to new realities? How do we repair damaged places and damaged social connections? How do we create cities that are not merely efficient, but genuinely livable?
The 63rd IMCL Conference did not pretend that these questions have simple answers. But it offered something equally important: evidence that solutions are already emerging. They are emerging in historic European cities finding new relevance for old patterns of urban life. They are emerging in communities rebuilding after conflict. They are emerging in neighborhoods experimenting with new forms of participation, design, and regeneration. And perhaps most importantly, they are emerging from the commitment of people who refuse to give up on their cities.
The generous partnership of Riga and Jelgava, the insights of international participants, and the courage of colleagues from Ukraine provided a powerful reminder: even in times of disruption, cities remain among humanity’s greatest tools for cooperation, creativity, and hope.
ABOVE: Chair of the Jelgava Council (Mayor), Mārtiņš Daģis receives the 2026 IMCL Livable Cities Award from IMCL Board member Jim Brainard for the City's progress in regenerating after the devastation of WWII. The background shows photos from the city's rich urban past.