From Place Transformation to Practical Learning: What SteelCityZen Can Contribute

In September 2026, the OECD published Unpacking place transformation, a new working paper examining why some places manage to reinvent themselves after structural economic change while others remain trapped in decline. The paper is highly relevant for SteelCityZen: our partner cities are dealing with industrial restructuring, changing skills needs, demographic pressures and labour-market transition, while trying to build new local development pathways.

The OECD argues that successful transformation is about more than replacing lost jobs or restoring economic growth. It can involve reshaping local industries, institutions and identities, while combining economic outcomes with well-being, dignity and belonging. It also highlights the importance of less tangible factors such as local leadership, social capital and place identity — what it describes as part of the “soft infrastructure” of transformation.

The OECD paper also emphasises that there is no single pathway to economic revival. Regions may renew existing industries, create entirely new activities, attract knowledge and investment from outside, or diversify by combining existing capabilities in new ways. For industrial cities, this is an important message. Transformation does not necessarily require abandoning the industrial past. Existing skills, technologies, firms and institutions may become important resources for a new development path. The challenge is to identify which capabilities can be renewed, which can be transferred into related sectors and where something genuinely new needs to emerge.

Perhaps the most interesting lesson for SteelCityZen, however, concerns the less visible conditions behind transformation. OECD work highlights factors such as strong local leadership, social capital, local narratives and the reframing of local identity. These are difficult to measure, but they influence whether local actors can cooperate, whether there is enough trust to act collectively and whether a city can imagine a future that is different from its past.

This is also where the paper becomes particularly relevant for the ongoing SteelCityZen pilots. At the end of the report, the OECD points to several areas where the evidence base is still incomplete. We still need to know more about how soft infrastructure influences local development, how places identify the most promising levers for change, why some interventions are successfully implemented while others are not, and how different levels of government and local institutions can work together more effectively.

SteelCityZen cannot answer all of these questions, but it can contribute practical evidence. Our pilots offer an opportunity to look closely at what happens when cities try to turn analysis into action. Which stakeholders prove essential? Who takes ownership? Which institutional barriers appear only once implementation starts? What has to be adapted along the way? And does the process create stronger relationships and greater capacity for cooperation than existed before?

This means that we should not look only at the visible outputs of the pilots — workshops organised, people reached, services tested or strategies developed. We should also observe the processes behind them. Did new relationships emerge between municipalities, employers, employment services or training providers? Did stakeholders begin to define the local challenge differently? Did a clear local coalition or leadership role develop? Which elements of the pilot are likely to continue once project funding ends?

These questions may help us understand something that is often difficult to capture in regional development projects: whether a pilot is merely delivering an activity or whether it is also strengthening the local capacity to manage future change.

There is another important dimension. The OECD asks how places can identify the most relevant levers for transformation when many challenges are present at the same time. Industrial cities may face skills shortages, demographic decline, weak business dynamics, institutional fragmentation and declining sectors simultaneously. No project can address everything at once. For SteelCityZen, it is therefore worth asking not only what each pilot is doing, but also why this intervention was chosen, why now, and what wider transformation pathway it is intended to support.

Seen from this perspective, the pilots become more than isolated experiments. Together, they form a small comparative laboratory of industrial cities trying to respond to structural change under very different local conditions.

That is where SteelCityZen may be able to make a useful contribution to the wider debate on place transformation. By documenting not only what worked, but also what had to change, who became involved, where cooperation broke down and what remained after the intervention, the project can add practice-based evidence to questions that are still open at European and OECD level.

-from the ÖSB team-