63rd IMCL in Latvia Will Be Another Rich Immersive Experience in the Latest Livable City Developments

The neighboring cities of Riga and Jelgava are fascinating laboratories of emerging global leadership and resilience — offering exactly the kind of firsthand, peer-to-peer learning that has made IMCL conferences a formative experience for urban professionals for four decades

ABOVE: The beautiful venue cities of Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, newly stable and prosperous after centuries of fascinating and sometimes disruptive history.

RIGA, LATVIA - Imagine walking through the streets of Riga's Old Town with a group of colleagues who have spent their careers thinking about exactly what you are seeing — the grain of the streets, the scale of the buildings, the width of pathways, the way people claim and inhabit public space. Someone makes an observation that reframes something you have been wrestling with for months. The conversation continues over dinner, spills into the next morning's session, and by the time you board your flight home, you are carrying not just new ideas but new ways of seeing.

That is what an IMCL conference delivers — and has been since 1985.

The 63rd conference, July 6–10 in Riga and Jelgava, comes at a moment when the theme — Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption — could not be more precisely matched to its setting. Latvia is one of Europe's remarkable contemporary success stories: a stable, prosperous EU and NATO member that has navigated genuine historical disruption and emerged with extraordinary civic vitality. Riga is an architecturally rich, walkable capital alive with street-level energy. Jelgava, its smaller neighbor, is actively working through the challenges of urban regeneration in real time. Together they form an unusually instructive pair of urban laboratories — the kind of place where theory and practice become impossible to separate.

Workshops and site-based explorations will allow participants to engage directly with both cities, assessing real conditions and proposing actionable strategies in the peer-to-peer tradition that distinguishes IMCL from every other gathering in the field. Immersive workshops on real challenges will deepen the content of plenary and breakout content, as well as local study tours. The goal, as always, is not abstract discussion but practical insight that participants can take home and apply.

The accepted abstracts reflect the full scope of the challenges all cities face right now:

Regenerative Urbanism and Climate Resilience — Regenerative zoning, adaptive reuse, stormwater and flood resilience, urban heat and gendered vulnerability, African vernacular climate adaptation, geothermal and energy-efficient housing, fractal urbanism, and green-integrated mobility corridors.

Community Engagement, Equity, Affordability, and Social Infrastructure — Participatory planning, children as urban users, civic living labs, community-led urban recovery, farm worker housing, supportive housing, public markets as civic infrastructure, protest-friendly urban design, and micro-actions for community health.

Walkability, Mobility, and Multimodal Transportation — Pedestrian infrastructure, accessible network analysis, cycling wayfinding, transit-oriented development, the 15-minute city, multimodal transport paradigms, and street liveability methodology.

Heritage, Cultural Identity, and Urban Form — Historic preservation, DNA of place, cultural continuity and urban identity, Soviet and post-Soviet urbanism, post-war reconstruction, heritage building restoration, architectural sculpture, and building façade design.

Neuroscience, Well-being, and the Human Experience of Place — Neuroaesthetics and beauty, biophilic design, neurourbanism and citizen science, VR in urban research and memory, fractal pattern perception, lifecycle urbanism, and the psychosocial dimensions of space.

Urban Design Theory, Policy, and Practice — Pattern languages, Christopher Alexander and timeless building principles, regenerative and resilient architecture, tax increment financing, smart city metrics, digital civic engagement, suburban downtown revitalization, and urban fabric repair.

What distinguishes an IMCL gathering is not simply the exchange of the latest ideas, but the depth of engagement with place, people, and practice. The informal conversations, the shared meals, the impromptu debates on a street corner — the moment when something you have been thinking about abstractly suddenly becomes legible in the grain of a real place — these are returns on investment that no amount of screen time can replicate.

This is precisely the kind of moment when that investment matters most. Cities everywhere are navigating converging pressures — environmental, social, technological, political. The professionals who will lead the response are the ones who stay engaged, who show up, who do the hard work of learning from each other and from places that have something genuine to teach.

Riga and Jelgava have that. IMCL will draw it out. We hope to see you there!

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The IMCL conferences were begun in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, a British architectural scholar, passionate about sharing the latest and most advanced knowledge about how to make cities more livable — healthier and more ecological, prosperous, just and beautiful. More information about the 63rd IMCL conference, and a link to register, can be found at https://www.imcl.online/latvia