Urban Futures Festival at CKD, Zagreb, Croatia

A CARAVANE One-Day Exchange on City, Space & Nature

On 7 November 2025, the CKD Headquarters on Pavla Hatza Street in Zagreb opened its doors for a one-day urban futures event within the CARAVANE Project EU. The gathering brought together city officials, community leaders, policy makers, young artists, and activists to explore how Zagreb is shaped, how space is used, and how people can remain connected to nature in an increasingly urbanized landscape.

Hosted in CKD’s artistic and civic space, the event created a forum where creativity and policy met face-to-face — not to celebrate a finished work, but to question what kind of city we are building, and for whom.

A Film About the City and Its Invisible Limits

The centrepiece of the festival was the screening of a one-hour documentary on Zagreb’s urbanization. Filmed with a high level of technical precision — combining indoor and outdoor shots, detailed sound recording, and expert-quality photography — the documentary traced how the city expands, who benefits from its growth, and what remains unspoken in the planning of public life.

The film highlighted a paradox: Zagreb contains significant green space per inhabitant, yet policies and real-estate pressures restrict how public space can be accessed, shared, and lived in. The narrative raised questions about who shapes the city’s future, and how a green city can still limit its citizens’ relationship to nature when planning is driven more by regulations than by community needs.

Dialogue Between Art, Policy & Community

Following the screening, a discussion unfolded between city officials, policy experts, environmental organizations, and young artistic participants from CARAVANE. Their dialogue did not revolve around abstract ideas, but around lived realities: the lack of accessible common spaces, the role of urban activism, the power of policy tools to protect nature, and the responsibility of creative communities to make these issues visible.

Participants reflected on whether a city can be “green” only on paper, and how actions at the local level shape not just sustainability, but democratic ownership of space. Activists and cultural workers emphasized that climate and space justice must emerge not through occasional intervention, but through continuous engagement in public dialogue.

Artistic Documentation for the Public Sphere

Beyond the screening and conversations, the event contributed to the wider CARAVANE aim of documenting youth creativity and civic engagement. The material presented at CKD forms part of a broader CARAVANE deliverable — a public report featuring artistic outputs, implementation insights, expert commentary, and a synthesis of activities across labs.

This documentation will serve as both a creative archive and an educational reference, helping wider audiences understand how young artists engage with local identities, how urban issues become artistic narratives, and how these works help bridge local realities with broader European cultural contexts.

A City, a Community & a Future to Imagine

The one-day festival at CKD was not only about showcasing a film, but about inviting a question: What does a sustainable city look like when its people and nature are allowed to thrive together?

Participants left with a shared understanding that the future of urban living cannot be planned by institutions alone. It must be shaped in dialogue with communities, artists, activists, planners, and the environments we inhabit. In this spirit, the festival became more than an event — it became a reminder that urban resilience grows where creativity, policy, and public space intersect.