On May 28, 2026, the SDG Local Action series hosted its webinar “Reimagining public spaces.” The event featured two cities at the forefront of innovative approaches to urban public space: Pasig City (Philippines) and Belfast(United Kingdom). Both are winners of the latest edition of the 2025 Mayors Challenge — a global competition for new ideas in public service delivery. Moderated by Diana Lopez, UNDP Advisor on Cities and Local Governments, the session explored how cities can reclaim forgotten or underused spaces to improve quality of life, community cohesion, and climate resilience.
Public spaces are not only amenities. They are places where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds meet, breathe, and connect. Yet in many cities, these spaces either do not exist, are poorly designed, or fall into disuse. The challenge, as usual, is how to create them and how to make them truly usable and inclusive.
The video recording of the webinar is available on our YouTube channel – in English, Spanish, and French.
PASIG CITY: CREATING FLOATING PARKS ON THE RIVER
Context
Pasig City, located on the eastern border of Metro Manila in the Philippines, is home to approximately 853,000 residents according to the 2024 census — with a much larger daytime population due to heavy transit flows. The city is crossed by three rivers and 17 creeks, yet it is one of the most densely built-up urban areas in the country. When city-owned parks and linear parks are divided by the number of residents, the result is just 0.6 square meters of green space per person.
Flooding has shaped the city’s memory. The 2009 floods left lasting trauma among residents, and the construction of river walls — designed as a protective solution — ended up disconnecting communities from the waterways they once faced. Today, the river is perceived as a danger rather than a resource.
The COVID-19 pandemic added another layer of urgency. As social distancing became mandatory, city officials noticed that access to open space was profoundly unequal: middle and upper-income residents had gardens and communal areas in gated communities, while those in denser neighborhoods had almost none.
Solutions
The city identified riverside easements — three-meter strips along the riverbanks that cannot be built on — as the only available unbuildable land in an otherwise saturated city. From this constraint came an opportunity: a proposal for floating parks that expand usable space onto the water, without destroying the river walls or exposing communities to flood risk.
The project includes three interconnected elements:
- The floating infrastructure: modular pontoons anchored with concrete blocks (no riverbed piling required) placed in sections of the Pasig River with natural lay-bys that preserve the navigable channel. The parks include floating wetlands inspired by the Chicago Wild Mile model, which have proven capacity to treat water and increase wildlife habitat.
- A community-led stewardship: residents from four riverside districts will co-manage the parks — a first for Pasig City. The city is developing a governance model for resident-led maintenance that could be replicated across 14 other riverside neighborhoods (barangays).
- A replicable playbook: all technical and community engagement learnings will be documented for deployment across the city.
Community engagement
During the 2025 Mayors Challenge finalist phase, the city conducted extensive prototyping with residents. Initial hesitation was significant — many residents, traumatized by past flooding, were reluctant to trust a floating structure. The team responded by borrowing an actual barge to demonstrate stability. The result was unexpected: elderly residents began sharing childhood memories of playing by the river, and children refused to leave.
Design charrettes surfaced two broad categories of demand for the space: structured interaction (dancing, assembling, community events) and quiet individual use (meditation, fishing, looking at the river). Safety and maintenance were the top concerns — and residents were challenged to become part of the solution.
The city also identified gaps in its consultation process. Schoolchildren, a key group of future park users, had not yet been formally engaged, and targeted outreach is now planned for the implementation phase.
SDG connection
The project targets SDG 3 (good health and well-being), SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 14 (life below water), SDG 15 (life on land), and SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions).
BELFAST: GREENING 200 KILOMETRES OF URBAN ALLEYWAYS
Context
Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland counts with a population of approximately one million, and it has 200 kilometers of narrow alleyways running behind its residential streets — a legacy of late-19th-century industrial housing built to support the shipyard boom. Originally used for deliveries and access to homes, the alleyways gradually fell into disuse. During the conflict period from the late 1960s through the 1980s, many areas became no-go zones. Today, they are largely used for fly-tipping and other activities that require costly municipal interventions.
Two hundred kilometers of alleyways is equivalent to approximately 75 football pitches of urban space — much of it untapped.
Catalyst for change
The first alleyway transformation in Belfast took place in 2015, when long-term residents in the Holylands area created Wildflower Alley — a quiet green space developed in response to disruption from a transient student population. The project attracted city-wide attention and sparked interest in replication.
In 2024, as part of Belfast 2024, the council began exploring how alleyways could be systematically reimagined. Winning the 2025 Mayors Challenge is an opportunity to pilot and scale up the concept. The initiative aligns with the city’s broader corporate commitment to developing a sustainable and nature-positive city, including a target to plant one million trees by 2035 and an explicit focus on tree equity in neighborhoods with poor health and learning outcomes.
Community consultation during the Mayors Challenge revealed that residents were angry — the dominant sentiment — at the neglect of these spaces and at the absence of civic investment. At the same time, there was genuine and widespread interest in change.
Solutions
Belfast’s model rests on three pillars:
- Public sector commitment: Belfast City Council is working with the Department for Infrastructure and the Department for Communities to formalize shared responsibility for alleyway stewardship. This inter-institutional coordination is fundamental to long-term viability.
- Community-led stewardship: the city does not want to create transformed spaces only to find them abandoned six months later. A key learning from the consultation process is that communities respond better to facilitators who are independent of government — they are more open, more candid, and more engaged. The pilot will test a facilitated model where independent community facilitators work with resident groups to co-develop and maintain alleyways.
- Inspiration and communications: a communications strategy running alongside the pilot will document and amplify positive changes, with the aim of igniting interest from other communities across the city to join a scaled-up program from year two onwards.
Pilot and next steps
The next pilot phase runs from June to October 2026, followed by a reflection period in November–December. The findings will inform how the program scales to address the full 200 kilometers. The focus will be on neighborhoods that are struggling — those with weaker community cohesion, divided communities, and lower investment levels — where the potential for positive change is greatest.
The city is also examining the financial case: maintaining neglected alleyways currently costs significant municipal resources (cleaning, graffiti removal, needle collection). By transferring stewardship to communities — with appropriate support — the city expects to redirect those costs toward sustaining the program over the long term, potentially through participatory budgeting mechanisms.
On security: the primary strategy is activation. The more an alleyway is used, maintained, and valued by the community, the less likely it is to attract antisocial behavior. Lighting, gating, and other physical interventions remain options where needed.
SDG connection
The project addresses SDG 3 (health outcomes), SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), SDG 11 (sustainable cities), SDG 13 (climate resilience), SDG 15 (biodiversity and greening), and SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions).
COMMON THEMES AND LESSONS LEARNED
Despite their geographical and cultural distance, Pasig City and Belfast surfaced strikingly similar challenges and insights:
- Unused space as opportunity: both cities are making creative use of neglected or legally restricted space — riverside easements and urban alleyways — rather than seeking new land.
- Community co-design is not optional: building a space is not enough. Both cities learned that residents must be involved from the beginning to ensure spaces are used, maintained, and valued. Design charrettes, prototyping, and facilitated engagement are essential tools.
- Independent facilitation works better: both cities found that when community engagement is led by facilitators independent of the city government, conversations are more honest and productive.
- Sustainability requires planning from day one: the question of who maintains a space once it is created must be answered before it is built. Both cities are developing community stewardship models to avoid the common pattern of investment followed by abandonment.
- Safety concerns are real — and manageable: in both cases, perceived danger was a barrier to community uptake. Prototyping, direct engagement, and activation (not just physical security measures) proved more effective than top-down reassurance.
- Cities can advance multiple SDGs through a single intervention: public space is not just a quality-of-life issue. It is a health issue, a climate issue, an equity issue, and a community cohesion issue — and both cities are framing it as such.
CONCLUSION
The experiences of Pasig City and Belfast show that some of the most impactful urban interventions begin with looking at what is already there — a neglected river easement, a forgotten alleyway — and asking: what could this become?
What makes these projects stand out is not just their physical ambition, but their commitment to community co-ownership. Both cities are moving away from the model of the city as the sole decision-maker and toward one where residents are partners in design, stewardship, and accountability.
As cities worldwide face growing pressure on public space, deepening inequalities in access to green areas, and urgent climate adaptation needs, these two cases offer a compelling message: local governments can turn overlooked spaces into powerful engines of inclusion, resilience, and well-being — one floating park, one alleyway at a time.