IURC: shaping urban and regional cooperation across Latin America and Europe

Better urban futures don’t happen by chance. They require the right partnerships, the right frameworks, and the right people in the room. Anteverti works with 20 cities and 23 regions across Latin America and Europe to coordinate cooperation that moves — from shared challenges to joint strategies, and from strategy to action — on the issues that matter most: from sustainability and resilience to governance, mobility, and the green transition.

The challenge

Cities and regions across the world are dealing with the same pressures: housing costs, climate urgency, digital disruption, changing mobility patterns, the need to grow differently. None of them can solve these challenges alone — and most of them already know it.

What’s missing isn’t awareness. It’s the infrastructure for meaningful, sustained cooperation: platforms to exchange knowledge, frameworks to align ambitions, and the capacity to turn peer learning into real outcomes.

The International Urban and Regional Cooperation (IURC) programme, funded by the European Union, was built to fill that gap — bringing together cities and regions across Europe and Latin America to address shared sustainable development challenges through structured, solution-oriented exchange.

Our approach

Anteverti is the implementation partner for the Latin America branch of IURC, working on behalf of the European Commission. We oversee cooperation across 20 cities and 23 regions — a network representing over 90 million people.

Our work is about more than facilitation. We design the conditions for cooperation to take root: peer-to-peer exchange that goes beyond formality, outcomes that address real urban challenges, and a shared foundation that holds across different institutional cultures and political contexts. The goal is partnerships that outlast the programme.

The impact

What started as a framework for exchange is becoming a platform for action. Across both continents, Anteverti has activated Communities of Practice around the challenges shaping the future of cities: affordable housing, the green transition, digital inclusion, plastic pollution, the night-time economy, hydrogen value chains.

Key milestones — the IURC Global Thematic Networking Workshop in Barcelona in November 2025 and the IURC LAC Regional Networking Event in Cali, Colombia, in April 2026 — have moved the programme from connection to collaboration, and from collaboration to action.

By 2027, participating cities and regions will have implemented pilot projects of their own design. Cooperation, made concrete.