CityMakers Voices No.6 — Thure Krarup

Krarup believes investors who control capital want to help make cities more liveable, but what's missing is a structure patient enough to bring back returns on work that runs for often more than a decade, where developers and mayors need to share common goals. This is where Urban Partners fits into the equation.

Krarup is the latest guest of CityMakers Voices, a conversation series from the Holcim Foundation gathering the people whose decisions shape the cities we live in — mayors and architects, planners and patrons, financiers and engineers — for open discussion on the work of building better urban environments.

This conversation took place on the fringes of London Climate Action Week 2026. In it, Krarup explains what makes a ‘progressive developer', and is candid about which cities are leading the way in enabling them.

Where does the capital for CityMaking sit, and what is your role in moving it?

There is a lot of capital out there. It gets thrown around as a cliché in every Climate Week discussion, but it is also extremely true. There are billions and trillions sitting in global pension schemes and sovereign wealth funds, divided internally — infrastructure, real estate, different asset classes. Our role is to be the bridge between that long-term capital and the needs and demands of cities as they evolve over time. New challenges keep arriving: affordability is the biggest one currently, then resiliency, then urban regeneration. We create the capital products that make it possible for those long-term investors to get engaged. Some have their own real estate teams and work directly with cities; we manage funds on behalf of a large group of global investors.

It sounds like a lot of moving parts.

These worlds speak differently, think differently, and are incentivized differently, and cities have their own language too. But the interests at the core are converging. Capital wants to get into cities. It sees the same challenges and wants to get engaged. It wants to do good, and it also carries a fiduciary duty — at the very end of that spectrum sits the person who worked their entire life and put their money into a pension scheme. They need a return; otherwise, that part of the equation doesn't add up. Our role has been to create the products that make those worlds match and unlock the capital.

Let's hone in on sustainable urban regeneration. What makes that attractive to an investor, and how do you sell it?

First, the scale of the product. We are talking about very large plots, and the whole premise of the investment vehicle is that we can turn these areas into well-functioning neighborhoods. When you talk about a neighborhood rather than an asset, you are working to a different logic. Real estate normally buys an asset, optimizes it, sells it, makes it grow in value. Those are the rules of that game.

So we needed to create a different purpose-built investment vehicle, because this work takes a long time and carries real complexity from a governance and regulatory perspective: pollution, water, waste, all of it. The scale at which you can create impact is what is attractive, and there is a great deal of public good in it, because you genuinely help create cities that function. You know it when you pass through a well-regenerated area. Nordhavn in Copenhagen is one. King's Cross in London is another.

So where are you going in at the city level, and who are you convincing?

There are various ways in. We have our own solid network, and we work primarily through local developers. We set it as a key parameter for working with them that they have an extremely strong understanding of the local circumstances — we can't know every city out there. A core team and core platform sit within our system, but for each project we need to find progressive developers with the right connections, so we get that hyper-local understanding of the city we are working in and a trusted partner responsible for that specific development. We are there on the capital side, with top-level expertise, to make sure these projects deliver on the promise we are making to investors and cities, set a timeline, and help the projects along as they go.

Capital is often what's lacking, and I guess that is also the core of this conversation: you can't do anything with public financing alone. That is just true all the way. So you need to bring in private capital, and you want the right type of progressive capital with the right type of partners, where you also have that political steer — so it doesn't become another bad example of a real estate deal that went south. This is something we believe deeply in, and we have investors ready to take that jump with us. Now it is about going specific: we need to find the projects, and we need to work on them with the cities and with the local developers.

I like the idea of the progressive developer. Do they exist in Europe in the numbers you need?

They do exist. Part of the engine room we are setting up is also defining what a progressive developer is — what our demands are of the local developer. Sometimes there is a match, other times there isn't. I believe you can codify what you consider progressive, and I believe they are there, and that in the end there is a strong convergence on what a great city looks like.

We will have to do a lot of due diligence on the people we work with, and we will gather a lot of data around the cities we work in, because it is also a bet on the city. City leadership is a huge part of that. The overall socioeconomic indicators are part of that. For us, it is going to be very important to find the right cities with the right mix and the right political drive to have these projects actually delivered with the right impact in mind.

Urban Partners is a Copenhagen firm, and Urban Partners grew out of success in your own city. When you look beyond the Nordics, where do you go? Do we end up with a disparity between the green-minded rich cities of Europe and the ones that struggle?

That's a tough one. To bet on a large-scale urban regeneration project, a couple of things need to hold true: you need a city that wants it and can absorb it, and you need the right partners.

What gives me more hope is the middle. A layer of cities is doing extremely well, and those are easy to pinpoint, like the Nordic capitals. Those are likely to be in the first round, where we'll start, because those are the cities we know. But there are a lot of secondary cities that, for various reasons, could be extremely interesting. Everyone speaks about Manchester in the UK, Stuttgart in Germany. And then there are probably the up-and-comers that could be interesting for other reasons, where you could also think about blended financing.

We would love the EU instruments to start really kicking in, and I see a great deal of interest from the EU side. The housing plan includes elements of this, and the guarantee that comes with it makes blended finance possible—institutional capital alongside concessional capital, including from the European Investment Bank, the European Investment Fund, and the EBRD. That makes the more uncertain bets easier to go to. But we are just getting started, so we will start where we know the market best and where we're confident this can truly get off the ground. Then there is more to come.

This interview is part of CityMakers Voices, a conversation series from the Holcim Foundation that gathers the thinkers, designers, and decision-makers whose work shapes the cities we live in. They form part of CityMakers, a new resource focused on the people, places, and programs revitalizing the urban realm.