Report on the Emerging ChangeMaker (ECM) 2025
Leadership through Interdependence: Enabling the Future of CityMaking is a new report from the Holcim Foundation and Arup that presents a transferable methodology for navigating urban uncertainty through 2035. Co-published with Arup, one of the world’s leading engineering and design consultancies, the report explores how cities, practices, and planning departments can respond to accelerating change with greater clarity, collaboration, and systemic awareness.
The report was shaped by the Holcim Foundation’s 2025 Emerging ChangeMaker cohort, bringing together 14 early-career architects, engineers, and planners from MIT, Cornell, UCL, Delft, the University of Sydney, and UNAM. Selected from the Foundation’s Fellowship programme, the cohort represents a new generation of urban thinkers continuing the Fellowship’s focus on positive urban change across 2024 and 2025.
Developed through a week-long workshop in Zurich, the report maps the forces most likely to reshape cities through 2035, including grid capacity, supply chain fragmentation, climate migration, and AI infrastructure. The cohort created three future scenarios to stress-test projects and policies, examining how decision-makers can respond when social, environmental, technical, and economic pressures converge.
In highlighting the reflections of the Emerging ChangeMakers, Leadership through Interdependence shows why cities must be understood as interconnected systems, why policy reform depends on the culture that supports it, and why planning must centre communities too often left out of the conversation. The result is a unique collaboration between established leaders and emerging talent, offering a practical and optimistic framework for where the next generation wants to take the built environment.
