This report is the second of two publications on the Urban Agenda for the EU. In our first publication, the essay ‘Learning with Cities, Learning for Cities. The Golden Opportunity of the Urban Agenda for the EU’ (Potjer & Hajer, 2017), we explore contemporary ideas on the potential of cities in multi-level governance, coming to conclusions on how the Urban Agenda for the EU can harness the strength of cities. The essay provides the underlying perspective for this report, in which we present the results of our empirical research into the practice of the Urban Agenda for the EU.

Suzanne Potjer is a junior researcher at the Urban Futures Studio, Utrecht University, and project lead of the project ‘Experimenting with Cities’. Her research is concerned with ‘experimental governance’. Through both empirical research and practical interventions, she investigates practices of experimental governance to gain insight into how they can help solve urban challenges.

Maarten Hajer is distinguished professor Urban Futures at the Utrecht University, and director of the Urban Futures Studio. Before that he was also Director of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL – Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving). He has written extensively about cities, governance and sustainability.

Peter Pelzer is a researcher and lecturer at the Urban Futures Studio, Utrecht University. He holds a PhD in urban planning and was the project leader of the Post-Fossil City Contest. His research interest is in sustainable cities of the future and ways to imagine them. In line with this, he currently leads a research project into the neighborhood of the future.

The Urban Futures Studio is a transdisciplinary institute devoted to the study of positive urban futures and of ways to get there. It conducts empirical research on existing practices, but also helps to initiate new experiments. The Studio is convinced that innovative thinking starts in ‘crossovers’ between distinct disciplines, and in coalitions of new and old agents of change. Find out more at www.uu.nl/ufs.