The second part of the Utopian Hours 2026 international city-making festival will be held in Turin on October 16 and 17. After a first chapter in Rotterdam, the festival is marking its tenth anniversary edition by returning to its hometown in Italy. The event's lineup and cultural program are designed to explore how cities can respond creatively to the social, environmental, and political challenges of the 21st century. The Utopian Hours festival has been organized since 2017 by Stratosferica, a nonprofit cultural association dedicated to producing and sharing urban knowledge through content on the evolution of cities, urban communication strategies, events, community building and placemaking.
Archigram's Sir Peter Cook will travel to Turin to take part in the festival just one week before his 90th birthday. He will deliver a masterclass on the first day at La Centrale Lavazza about his experience imagining and studying cities, and the power of imagination. During the festival, Sir Peter Cook and Archigram will also be the subject of an exhibition with works never shown in Italy before. The program will also bring together Wim Walschap, CEO and senior partner at Herzog & de Meuron; Zahra Ebrahim, co-founder of Monumental, an organization building bridges between communities and institutions in Toronto; and Carolyn Steel, who explores the concept of Sitopia ("food-place").
Other international projects and practices in the program include Rotterdam Rooftop Days, which explores the potential of city roofs for climate adaptation and public space; Gleispool, a large public swimming pool proposed for a former railway yard in Basel; Helsinki's Crown Bridges project; Quatorze, the nonprofit practice advancing solidarity-based architecture; Nice Developers, whose work sets out to prove that developers do not need to be nasty; Madrid-based ENORME Studio, which explores the future of architecture through experimental, participatory and transformable design; and Powerhouse Company, the international practice working across housing, architecture and urban transformation.
The two-day program includes keynote lectures, masterclasses and the Urbanites Fair at La Centrale Lavazza, and participatory working sessions at Dorado Community Hub focused on generating responses to contemporary urban challenges. The exhibitions, which include Sir Peter Cook's The City Is a Garden and Urban Frames (presented in collaboration with CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia), will also be held at Dorado. The festival is collaborating with the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR), bringing a selection of films dedicated to architecture and the city. The full schedule, with session times and venues, is available on the festival's online calendar; access to the roundtables at Dorado requires a Professional Pass.
After witnessing in Rotterdam both the urgency of today's urban challenges and the extraordinary creativity with which cities are responding to them, we return to Torino with even greater ambition. For Part 2 of our Ten Years Edition, Utopian Hours will continue to push boundaries, bringing some of the world's most radical ideas about cities to our hometown. Because now more than ever, cities are mental weapons. – Luca Ballarini, co-founder of Stratosferica
Two projects for the city of Turin were announced this year. In April, UNS's design proposal for Turin's new Metro Line 2, developed in collaboration with Settanta7, Mijksenaar, Frigorosso, 3BA and WSP, was selected by an international jury of experts chaired by Dominique Perrault. Most recently, in July, MVRDV and Balance Architettura unveiled their proposal for the renovation of the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM), following their selection through a public competition in December 2025. Also in Europe, Design Museum Gent recently opened a new wing by Carmody Groarke and ATAMA, and the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial announced the theme and dates for its second edition.
