• Citizens can play a crucial role in identifying or actively intervening in urban chal­lenges, often providing new perspectives and solutions. The co-creation of strategies to tackle urban challenges is crucial for their success and it can rely on both established or new and experimental participatory methods.
• The research and policy agendas for citizen participation should be co-created with citizens and all relevant stakeholders and include appropriate and robust evaluation and impact mechanisms to enable effective engagement.
• Several lifestyle and behavioural changes can help city inhabitants to significantly reduce their environmental footprint, such as shifting to a healthy diet, reducing waste, using active or public mobility modes or choosing sustainable energy sources.
• There is a trend towards strengthening urban governance in the EU, leading to the recent establishment of a wide range of new governance bodies and arrange­ments across EU cities and metropolitan areas.
• Urban governance has gained a central role in global development efforts. At least 65% of the New Urban Agenda’s goals and their 169 targets can only be achieved at the local level, particularly in urban areas.
• Global commitments, advocacy, as well as mobilisation and socialisation through large networks such as the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Metro­polis, C40, and the Global Covenant of Mayors, among others, are significantly empowering cities and accelerating the evolution of urban governance towards more horizontal cooperation, knowledge exchange and a demand for adequate resources for more and more decentralised competences and roles.

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