Moving through Madrid: Field notes from the Advanced Cooperation Mission in Madrid 

Madrid, Spain | 23–25 June 2026 

The IURC programme held its Advanced Cooperation Mission in Madrid as part of the Community of Practice on sustainable mobility and urban transformation, bringing together representatives from Fortaleza (Brazil) and Umeå (Sweden) to explore how Madrid is rethinking its streets, corridors and transport infrastructure as part of a wider strategy for a more liveable, connected and green city. 

Over three days, participants combined working sessions at Madrid City Hall with an intense programme of site visits — from metropolitan transport hubs to a live motorway construction site — and worked together on the definition of a pilot action to bring back to their own cities.

Day 1 | Madrid’s urban transformation, up close 

The mission opened at Palacio de Cibeles, Madrid City Hall’s landmark headquarters, where representatives from the city presented its main mobility, transport and urban transformation projects. The session gave the delegation a broad but grounded overview of Madrid’s institutional and strategic context — its priorities, its ongoing initiatives, and the logic connecting them. 

During the afternoon, the delegation worked on developing a pilot project concept of their own, focused on improving liveability, transforming streets and promoting proximity through mobility-related initiatives. The working session brought together the cities of Fortaleza and Umeå with the IURC–LAC team and the Madrid hosts to align ideas, expectations and the outline of a shared action. 

Day 2 | A city in motion 

The second day had a full programme of site visits that moved across Madrid’s mobility ecosystem from the metropolitan scale down to the street level. 

The morning opened at the CRTM/CITRAM headquarters in Ríos Rosas, where senior technical representatives of the Madrid Regional Transport Consortium presented the governance, operational and technical architecture behind an integrated local and regional public transport systems. From there, the delegation travelled to Torre Realia for a presentation on Madrid Nuevo Norte — one of the largest urban regeneration projects underway in the capital, where mobility infrastructure is not an add-on but a structural part of a broader transformation of the city’s northern districts. 

The delegation used Madrid’s public bus network to reach the EMT Fuencarral Depot, where the BiciMAD team presented the evolution and operational model of the city’s bike-sharing service — a concrete reference for cities thinking about how soft mobility solutions can be made to work at scale. Two further visits rounded off the day: the Canalejas Mobility Hub, a recently developed interchange improving accessibility and intermodality in the city centre, and the Plaza de España underground facility, which integrates parking with a range of mobility services to make more efficient use of dense central public space. 

What the day made visible, above all, was the coherence behind Madrid’s approach: infrastructure, transport and public space are planned as part of a single urban logic. 

Day 3 | From motorway to park — and back again 

The final day took the delegation underground. A site visit to the A-5 Southwest Green Corridor construction site allowed the group to see first-hand the tunnelling works underway to place one of Madrid’s major urban motorways below ground. The technical team walked participants through the construction methods, machinery, phasing, financing model and public–private arrangements involved — as well as the expected transformation of the surface: new green space, improved connectivity and more people-centred neighbourhoods in areas that have long been cut off by the motorway infrastructure above. 

A working session followed to continue refining the pilot action agreed on the first day and to wrap up the mission with a shared sense of direction and next steps. 

The day — and the mission — closed at Madrid Río, the riverfront park that has become one of the city’s most cited examples of large-scale urban transformation. Walking through it, the parallel with the A-5 was impossible to miss: Madrid Río was itself the product of burying the M-30 ring road underground, freeing the banks of the Manzanares for what is now one of the most used and most valued public spaces in the city. Seeing the finished result alongside the construction site still in progress gave the delegation a rare and vivid sense of what is possible — and what it takes to get there. 

About the IURC LAC Advanced Cooperation Missions

IURC Latin America and the Caribbean, part of the International Urban and Regional Cooperation (IURC) programme, connects cities and regions from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe to co-create sustainable, inclusive, and innovation-driven solutions. Through peer-to-peer exchange and partnerships, the programme contributes to improving citizens’ quality of life while strengthening global cooperation.

Advanced Cooperation Missions are on-site technical visits that build on the IURC programme’s collaborative and knowledge-sharing approach. They provide cities and regions with the opportunity to further develop the themes explored during the online meetings of the Communities of Practice, refine their cooperation action plans and gain first-hand experience of best practices implemented by the hosting city or region.