Client
Municipality of Leeuwarden
Location
Leeuwarden, Netherlands
Year
2025
Tag
Strategy
Like many Dutch municipalities, Leeuwarden is required to produce a coherent Environmental Vision (Omgevingsvisie) – a comprehensive urban strategy for the whole municipal territory. Recognizing the complexity of aligning various domains and interests in a lengthy writing process, Leeuwarden took an innovative approach: organizing a full week of intensive, creative workshops, facilitated by Bax-Healthy Cities.
In a single, focused week we brought policy, trends and place-based knowledge together to accelerate the start document (Basisnotitie) for Leeuwarden’s revised Omgevingsvisie. Working across multiple municipal locations with a broad cross-sectoral range of colleagues, we moved from dispersed inputs to a coherent storyline and a shared direction that guided decisions and delivery.
Leeuwarden is now set out to renew its citywide vision and translate ambition into practical choices. Our task was to create momentum, align the various domains within the municipality, gather input from all urban planning topics (energy, mobility, health & wellbeing, housing, etc.), and provide a structured path from strategy to action, without adding another long report to the shelf.
Set up of the workshop week (Mon–Thu)
We used a clear format that blended strategy and practice, creativity and cross-domain collaboration:
- Moonshots evaluated the long list of various domain-specific policies and their goals & ambitions, defined bold pictures of success and were stress-tested for desirability, feasibility and priority.
- Trends & developments established a common view of what is coming in the future, what needs to be adapted in future policy and why that matters for Leeuwarden
- On-site sessions weighed the different claims on space together: what fits where, what needs to go first, which trade-offs matter and how these trade-offs should be made.
- Final synthesis: overlapped the insights from the three sessions to identify blind spots, reveal overlaps, and determine where existing policy falls short in practice and for future challenges.
The Approach
To keep the story coherent from strategy to street, the ambition is framed through three themes across different urban contexts:
- Connect people, cohesion, health & wellbeing (Verbinden)
- Green nature, water, climate (Vergroenen)
- Value housing, economy, services (Verwaarden)
This simple 3×3 lens helped structure workshop sessions, and decisions land consistently in plans, programmes and places.
Ways of working
One important conclusion was the concept of MAAKKRACHT: zooming in and out through different scales, and to test in practice what actually works. We identified focus areas where effort had the most leverage, and used spatial programming to sequence actions and weigh trade-offs. The cadence of the week was fast, collaborative and hands-on. Overall, it was a productive week to accelerate the urban vision-making and to make it more ambitious.
