With record numbers of visitors and growing populations, Europe's cities are facing a simple but urgent challenge: how to remain affordable, liveable, and welcoming — for residents and visitors alike.
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This question was at the centre of a debate hosted by Euronews at TheMerode in Brussels where policymakers, urban planners and industry representatives discussed how cities can benefit from tourism growth while remaining affordable and liveable for residents.
Across the continent, tourism continues to surge. EU tourist accommodation recorded 3.1 billion overnight stays in 2025, an increase of 61.5 million nights (2 per cent) compared with the previous year, according to Eurostat.
At the same time, nearly three quarters of Europeans now live in urban areas, with city populations expected to keep rising in the coming decades.
These overlapping trends formed the backdrop to the Future of Cities Forum, which brought together speakers from a range of sectors including Pierpaolo Settembri, Deputy Head of Cabinet to the EU Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, Carlo Ratti, Director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, and Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy officer at Airbnb.
Urban housing supply and affordability under scrutiny
“Cities are at the epicentre of this housing affordability crisis,” said Matthew Baldwin, head of the European Commission’s Housing Task Force, raising one of the most pressing concerns of the discussion.
He warned that rising housing costs are no longer affecting only low-income households. “This is increasingly an issue for middle-income groups too. Police officers, teachers and social workers can no longer live in the cities they serve. It’s affecting our labour markets and our competitiveness.”
Baldwin, alongside panellists including Jan-Christoph Oetjen, Renew Europe MEP and Patrick Bontick, CEO of visitBrussels pointed to decades of under-building, land constraints and financing challenges as key factors limiting housing supply across Europe, causing prices to rise.
At a time when demand for housing continues to rise, Baldwin noted, the number of building permits issued across Europe has fallen by around 21 per cent. “Supply has not kept up with the surging demand, particularly in cities,” Baldwin admitted, highlighting planning and permitting procedures as a critical challenge.
Renew Europe MEP Jan-Christoph Oetjen argued that expanding housing supply will require cutting administrative barriers to both new construction and renovation — a point echoed by Build Europe representative Frank Hovorka, who highlighted regulatory constraints and land scarcity as key factors limiting development.
The prevalence of short-term rentals was also discussed, with panellists widely agreeing that when managed effectively, short-term rentals can help distribute tourism beyond central areas and supplement residents’ income.
“We are not only trying to address short term rentals,” Baldwin emphasised. “We know there is a mesh of other issues affecting problems on the housing supply and the demand side, particularly in cities. We're listening to cities, to industry and to everybody concerned.”
Maria Regina Maroncelli Florio, Vice President of the European Large Family Confederation and coordinator of the European Network of Family-Friendly Municipalities, said policymakers must consider the needs of families and long-term residents in particular when shaping urban housing strategies.
Ensuring access to social housing and maintaining neighbourhood spaces where local communities can meet should remain priorities for city administrations, she said, particularly as demographic changes reshape European urban areas.
Cities as interconnected systems
Tourism is a central pillar of the European economy, accounting for roughly 10 per cent of EU GDP and supporting around one in ten jobs, but swift growth in visitor numbers has intensified scrutiny of how cities manage visitor flows, housing and infrastructure.
During the debate, Patrick Bontick, Vice President of CityDNA and CEO of visit.Brussels, argued that the issue facing many destinations is not simply overtourism but the uneven distribution of visitors across neighbourhoods and seasons.
“There is not over-tourism, but unbalanced tourism,” he said, adding that better data – as gathered under the EU’s new regulation on short-term rental data – could help cities anticipate visitor flows and manage accommodation supply more effectively. “With data we will gain the information needed to better manage cities and decide what kind of supply we want,” he said.
“Too often our debate frames urban policy as a trade-off — liveability versus tourism, affordability versus innovation, residents versus visitors,” Juliette Langlais, Director of Public Policy and Campaigns EMEA at Airbnb, told the audience in her welcome speech.
To tackle growth challenges, she called for a more integrated approach that treats housing, mobility, tourism and infrastructure as interconnected parts of the same ecosystem, and which encourages evidence-based regulation of short-term rentals.
“Data-sharing with authorities. Transparent frameworks. Cross-sector coalitions. Cities function as interconnected systems — governance must do the same.”
Data-based approaches for cities in flux
The debate also touched on how city design and management can adapt not only to growth but also increasingly fluid patterns of work, mobility and tourism.
New research presented by Airbnb highlighted that the vast majority of Europeans — more than 8 in 10 — have experienced some sort of need for flexible housing. Short-term rentals can provide essential housing infrastructure for these moments of transition, including for education, work, access to medical care, as well as during major events and disaster response
Architect and urban researcher Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, explained in his keynote speech how new technologies and data — mapping everything from mobility patterns to tourism flows — could help policymakers better understand how cities function in real time.
Such insights could help governments, companies and researchers collaborate on solutions ranging from shared mobility to more efficient transport systems.
Hovorka reflected this sentiment later in the debate, saying: “We try to regulate cities as a snapshot, but we need to take a dynamic position to see cities as a flow of people, tourists, citizens, goods to maximise the use of infrastructure.”
Baldwin pointed to transactional transparency in the housing sector as a route to dynamic understandings of our cities, allowing real-time responses to emerging issues.
Collaboration as cities evolve
The debate set the scene for the new Future of Cities Coalition, a new pan-European initiative aimed at fostering cross-sector dialogue and encouraging more coordinated approaches to housing, tourism and urban planning.
Throughout the debate, speakers repeatedly returned to the importance of better data, stronger partnerships and more integrated policymaking to manage the pressures facing Europe’s cities.
Rather than treating housing, tourism and mobility as separate policy areas, panellists emphasised the need for coordinated strategies that reflect how cities function as interconnected systems.
The new Future of Cities Coalition was presented as one step towards that goal, supporting cross-sector partnerships by bringing together policymakers, researchers and industry stakeholders to share knowledge and collaborate on new approaches to urban challenges.
As European cities continue to grow, the debate in Brussels underscored a central challenge for policymakers: supporting urban growth strengthens communities rather than placing them under greater strain.