Visions for the city of the future, new solutions for the real estate sector, mobility and climate challenges in the city, original recipes for the revitalization of urban spaces.

Among the various themes of the festival, placemaking stands out, a multidisciplinary approach to the design and reactivation of public spaces in a collective way that aims to improve the quality of a street, a square, a neighborhood.

A collaborative process, which involves young people and citizens, sensitive to the context in which it operates, innovative because it is capable of uniting different practices and an evolving view of a particular place. Elena Granata, professor of Urban Planning at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Polytechnic of Milan, defines placemakers as «the designers of places, the inventors of the cities we will inhabit».

On the stage of Utopian Hours, to tell the processes that have led to the creation of extraordinary projects in cities around the world, the protagonists of some innovative urban enterprises such as Yes We Camp, Telliskivi Creative City, IF_DO, the big names of international urban design such as Matt Grunbaum of Field Operations, Dirk Van Peijpe of De Urbanisten and Kotchakorn Voraakhom of the Porous City Network.

With them some influential thinkers-activists who put the most urgent issues of our time at the center of their work: from the self-sufficiency of urban communities to urban AI, passing through the sustainability and social impact of urban regeneration.

«Let's not forget — explains Luca Ballarini, founder and director of Stratosferica — that cities are first and foremost the extraordinary fruit of human imagination, to mark their place in the cosmos.

At the same time today, ten thousand years after the appearance of the first cities in various parts of the world, we know with certainty that cities are also the destination of humanity: we are increasingly an urban species. These two powerful concepts, together, define the inspiration and investigation that Utopian Hours carries out every year thanks to the passionate contribution of hundreds of international and Italian guests.

With an open approach that goes beyond the ideologies and slogans of the moment and with the awareness that cities fascinate us precisely because they are complex and contradictory, the festival brings together in a great collective debate city officials, entrepreneurs, designers, urban planners, architects, placemakers, activists and urban philosophers. Perhaps this is also why it has become one of the most followed events on a global level. Turin in those three days is the place to be for all those who deal with cities and urban innovation in Italy and in the world".