Learning from the Baltics: What Can “Regions in Transition” Teach Global City Leaders?

From post-Soviet transformation to regenerative futures in Riga and Jelgava

ABOVE: The historic fabric of Latvia offers a distinctive "DNA of place" for potential regeneration.

RIGA, LATVIA - Across the world, a growing number of regions are grappling with profound structural transitions—economic, demographic, environmental, and geopolitical. Yet some of the most instructive examples are not found in the usual “global city” case studies, but in places that have undergone deep systemic change over a relatively short historical period. Among these, the Baltic region—and Latvia in particular—offers a uniquely rich and relevant laboratory.

The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference, to be held in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026, will bring this context into sharp focus. Under the theme of regenerative architecture and urbanism, the conference will explore how cities can move beyond recovery, and toward more adaptive, resilient, and life-enhancing urban systems. Crucially, it will do so not only through presentations on the latest research and case studies from around the world. It will also engage deeply with the urban fabric of these two cities—each representing a different scale, history, and set of opportunities.

A Region Shaped by Disruption—and Opportunity

Latvia’s urban landscape reflects a layered history of occupation, independence, and reinvention. After decades under Soviet governance, Latvian cities have undergone rapid political and economic transformation since the early 1990s. This transition has left a complex legacy:

• Robust historic urban cores, particularly in Riga, with its UNESCO-listed Old Town and extraordinary Art Nouveau heritage

• Extensive Soviet-era housing estates and public buildings, often standardized, under-maintained, and thermally inefficient (especially those of the later Soviet occupation)

• Emerging pressures from globalization, demographic shifts, and climate change

• A growing policy and design interest in sustainability, livability, economic opportunity, and local identity

This set of challenges offers powerful opportunities for learning and transformation—not only relevant to Latvia's specific issues, but equally relevant to the most urgent global issues of livability, sustainability, affordability, and economic opportunity.

Riga and Jelgava: A Polycentric Lens

The pairing of Riga, the capital and largest city, with Jelgava, a smaller regional center located about 40 kilometers to the south, offers a compelling lens into polycentric urbanism.

Riga functions as a cultural, economic, and institutional hub, with a rich urban fabric that has attracted increasing international attention. Yet like many capital cities, it faces challenges of affordability in the core, lower-density development at the edges, and the integration of newer and older urban layers.

Jelgava, by contrast, represents a different but equally important condition: a secondary city in transition, with its own history of destruction (notably during World War II), reconstruction, and adaptation. Today, Jelgava is working to redefine its identity within a broader regional network—balancing local character with connectivity to Riga and the wider European system.

Together, these two cities illustrate a key question for contemporary urbanism: How can polycentric regions maximize opportunity, local identity, and resilience across multiple urban nodes with wider benefits for all, rather than concentrating them in a single dominant core?

From Observation to Action: A Workshop in Jelgava

A distinctive feature of this IMCL conference will be its emphasis on applied learning—not only discussing urban challenges, but actively engaging with them. In that spirit, the conference will include a hands-on workshop in Jelgava, focused on strategic retrofits to the public realm and its adjacent building fabric.

Participants will work collaboratively to propose improvements to:

• Public spaces and street environments, enhancing walkability, sociability, and ecological performance

• Soviet-era building facades, with strategies to improve:

  • Aesthetic quality and human scale

  • Thermal performance and energy efficiency

  • Material durability and long-term adaptability

• The integration of buildings and public space, strengthening the “place network” that supports everyday urban life

These interventions are not conceived as isolated design exercises, but as pattern-based strategies—repeatable, scalable approaches that can be adapted across similar contexts in Latvia and beyond.

ABOVE: Late Soviet-era buildings in Latvia, surrounded by a less than successful public realm

Key Questions for Global Practice

The Baltic case raises a set of questions that resonate far beyond the region:

• What unique lessons emerge from post-Soviet urban transformation?

  How can cities address inherited physical and institutional structures while fostering innovation and local identity?

• How do smaller cities like Jelgava complement larger urban centers like Riga within polycentric regions?

  What governance, investment, and design strategies enable mutually reinforcing development rather than zero-sum competition?

• Are regions in transition leading innovation in resilience and regeneration?

  Do constraints—economic, material, or institutional—actually foster more creative, adaptive solutions than those found in more stable contexts?

  
  

Why This Matters Especially Now

At a time when many cities are confronting aging infrastructure, housing challenges, climate pressures, and social fragmentation, the experience of regions like Latvia offers valuable lessons. These are places where large-scale transformation is not hypothetical—it is lived experience.

The lesson is not that one model can be exported wholesale. Rather, it is that the processes of adaptation, repair, and regeneration—when done well—can become a shared language of practice.

By convening in Riga and Jelgava, the IMCL conference invites participants to engage directly with this evolving landscape—to learn from it, to contribute to it, and to carry its lessons forward into other regions undergoing their own transitions.

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The IMCL was founded in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, a British architectural scholar. The Lennards met at the University of California, Berkeley, and the series they created there over forty years ago has become a premier international gathering of scholars, practitioners and city leaders, coming together across borders, sectors and disciplines to share the latest knowledge on effective solutions to today's urban challenges. The host organization, the non-profit Lennard Institute for Livable Cities, has hosted regular conference participants and prominent speakers from every continent except Antarctica. For more information about the 63rd IMCL conference, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.