11-09-2026
How can urban archetypes help us learn from different cities and support their pathways towards decarbonization?
In this video, Jacques Teller from University of Liège, shares his perspective on how we can learn across different urban contexts.
Learning Across Cities: How Urban Archetypes Support Circular Transformation
One of the strengths of the DECUB project is the diversity of its partners, cities and areas of expertise. Urban planning, architecture, environmental science and computer science come together to explore how urban blocks can be transformed towards more circular and climate-resilient models.
But how can knowledge gained from very different cities be transferred to other European contexts?
Urban archetypes are one of the key elements of the DECUB approach.
From different cities to transferable urban archetypes
The three DECUB Living Labs — Zaragoza in Spain, Heerlen in the Netherlands and Verviers in Belgium — represent very different urban realities. They differ in size, density, climate challenges, urban structure, heritage constraints, cadastral systems and administrative conditions.
Rather than treating each city as an isolated case, DECUB uses these differences as an opportunity to identify common urban patterns and archetypes.
Archetypes help the project move from individual examples to more generalisable solutions. They provide a way of describing and classifying urban blocks according to relevant characteristics, allowing different scenarios, challenges and circular transformation strategies to be compared across contexts.
This is particularly important because the objective of DECUB is not to develop a solution that works only in Zaragoza, Heerlen or Verviers. The ambition is to develop approaches and tools that can be adapted to other European cities.
Testing archetypes in real Living Labs
The archetypes are connected to the real-world conditions of the DECUB Living Labs.
In Heerlen, the project is exploring different scenarios for a selected urban block, taking into account existing buildings, development plans and the municipality’s objectives for circular development.
In Verviers, climate change and flooding create a very different context. Some buildings may need to be removed or replaced by green areas as part of climate adaptation strategies. This provides an opportunity to explore how circularity can be integrated with resilience and urban regeneration.
In Zaragoza, the Living Lab is located in the historic centre, where heritage protection limits the range of possible interventions. This creates another type of urban condition in which circular transformation must respond to specific regulatory and cultural constraints.
These three cases allow DECUB to test how different archetypes and transformation scenarios perform under very different conditions.
Archetypes as a bridge between data and decision-making
The use of archetypes also helps bridge the gap between complex urban data and practical decision-making.
Urban blocks contain a wide range of information: buildings, land parcels, uses, infrastructure, environmental conditions, ownership and regulatory constraints. Organising this information around meaningful archetypes can make it easier to analyse urban areas and explore possible transformation pathways.
The aim is to support users in answering practical questions:
What type of urban block are we dealing with?
What are its main constraints and opportunities?
Which circular transformation strategies could be appropriate?
What would different scenarios mean for the block?
How can these approaches be adapted to another urban context?
Towards a transferable tool
The ultimate ambition is to translate this knowledge into a practical tool that cities and developers can use to explore circular transformation at both city and urban-block level.
The archetypes provide an important foundation for this transferability. Instead of prescribing a single solution, DECUB seeks to provide a structured way of understanding different urban situations and identifying appropriate transformation options.
This is why municipalities and other stakeholders are involved from the beginning of the project. Their knowledge helps ensure that the archetypes and tools reflect real planning processes, administrative constraints and the decisions that cities and developers face.
By combining urban archetypes, real Living Labs, multidisciplinary knowledge and digital tools, DECUB aims to turn lessons from three very different European cities into knowledge that can be applied much more widely.
The ambition is not to find one solution for every city, but to understand different urban situations and provide the tools to transform them towards more circular and resilient futures.