Cartagena Urban Agenda and Innovation Accelerator

Year: 2022–2024  |  Client: Cartagena City Council (Ayuntamiento de Cartagena)  |  Country: Spain

Cities Forum supported the City of Cartagena in the design and roll-out of its local Urban Agenda, aligned with the Spanish Urban Agenda (AUE) and the United Nations 2030 Agenda. The commission was unusually complete: it combined a strategic-planning phase, diagnosing the city and defining its long-term direction, with the practical implementation of a dedicated urban-innovation accelerator, ensuring that strategy translated into projects rather than remaining on paper.

Our approach

The diagnostic integrated demographic, environmental, economic and mobility data to identify Cartagena's structural challenges and opportunities, organised along ten strategic axes covering climate neutrality, sustainable mobility, housing, social cohesion, tourism and digital transformation. Working closely with municipal officials and external stakeholders, the team co-designed a strategic action plan that assigned projects, indicators and governance mechanisms to each axis and established a framework for continuous monitoring. This participatory approach built shared ownership across departments and civil society, a decisive factor in the plan's durability.

What we delivered

In parallel, Cities Forum launched the ACELERADORA platform, a digital accelerator designed to incubate and scale priority urban-innovation projects, and accompanied the municipality in setting up the internal governance structures needed to run it. Complementary components included capacity-building modules delivered through an e-learning platform (CFA) and a full suite of communication materials to engage residents, businesses and partners in the agenda. Deliverables spanned the complete Urban Agenda document, an implementation roadmap with phased milestones, the technical specifications for the accelerator platform, training curricula for municipal staff, and a monitoring framework built around measurable outcomes.

Impact

The resulting ecosystem positioned Cartagena as a reference mid-sized Spanish city, combining strategic planning with operational mechanisms to deliver urban transformation across resilience, smart-city and socio-economic-regeneration priorities. Rather than a static document, the Urban Agenda became a living management tool: a shared roadmap linking European and national policy frameworks to concrete local action, backed by a platform and governance model capable of sustaining innovation over time. For Cities Forum, the project deepened a long-standing relationship with Cartagena and demonstrated the firm's capacity to move fluidly between high-level strategy and hands-on delivery within a single municipal engagement.