Leadership through Interdependence: Enabling the Future of CityMaking

The Holcim Foundation and Arup, one of the world's largest engineering and design consultancies, have co-published Leadership through Interdependence: Enabling the Future of CityMaking — a report offering cities, practices, and planning departments a transferable methodology for navigating uncertainty.

The report was shaped by the Foundation's 2025 Emerging ChangeMaker (ECM) cohort: 14 early-career architects, engineers, and planners from MIT, Cornell, UCL, Delft, the University of Sydney, and UNAM.

These talents were selected from the Holcim Foundation Fellowship program as global representatives to continue the fellowship’s narratives of positive urban change established through its work in 2024 and 2025.

At a week-long workshop in Zurich last December, the cohort mapped the forces most likely to reshape cities through 2035. Topics examined include grid capacity, supply chain fragmentation, climate migration, and AI infrastructure, with the team creating three scenarios to stress-test projects and policies.

Their reflections anchor this comprehensive report with underlying suggestions, including: why cities must be understood as interconnected systems; why policy reform fails without the culture to support it; why planning must center the communities typically left out of the conversation; and why leadership starts with self-awareness before it scales outward.

The result is a unique collaboration between critical thinkers shaping cities at the top of their field and the insights of emerging talent — a positive showcase of where the next generation wants to take the built environment.