When conversations turn to innovation, the vocabulary is remarkably predictable. Artificial intelligence, startups, venture capital, smart cities and emerging technologies dominate the discussion, while urban innovation is often reduced to sensors, digital platforms and new infrastructure.

Yet some of the most meaningful innovations emerge without inventing anything at all.

Sometimes they begin by looking differently at what already exists.

The first edition of Night of the Churches, held in Cluj-Napoca this summer, offers a compelling example. More than 20,000 people visited eighteen places of worship belonging to six different religious denominations during a single evening.

Churches that many residents pass every day became spaces for guided tours, concerts, conversations, architectural discovery and community gatherings.

The event was widely covered as a cultural success. What received far less attention, however, was the innovation model behind it.

In a conversation following the event, Andi Daiszler, president of the Daisler Association and one of the project’s initiators, repeatedly returned to a simple idea: innovation is not necessarily about creating something new, but about recombining what already exists.

“We just took what we had here in Cluj, put it together, gave it another perspective and presented it differently.”

That sentence may be the most interesting takeaway from the entire project.

Rediscovering the invisible city

Cities accumulate assets over centuries. Historic buildings, public squares, industrial sites, inner courtyards and religious landmarks form layers of infrastructure that often become almost invisible to those who live alongside them. Familiarity breeds indifference.

Night of the Churches challenged that perception by treating religious heritage not merely as a collection of sacred buildings, but as part of the city’s cultural infrastructure.

The churches themselves were never the innovation.

The innovation was changing the relationship between citizens and places they thought they already knew.

This distinction matters because it shifts the conversation away from investment towards imagination. Rather than asking what a city should build next, the project asks a more provocative question: what existing assets are we failing to see?

Daiszler believes the same approach could extend far beyond churches.

A “Night of the Courtyards.” A “Night of the Factories.” Other overlooked places that already exist, waiting to be experienced differently.

“The potential is there,” he told me. “What is needed are the people willing to make it happen.”

Trust as civic infrastructure

If the physical infrastructure already existed, another form of infrastructure had to be built from scratch: trust.

Bringing together six religious denominations in a common initiative had never been attempted in Romania. Rather than approaching each community individually, the organisers first sought institutional legitimacy by asking the Prefect of Cluj to invite every recognised religious denomination to participate.

It was a strategic decision.

An invitation coming from a public institution carried a different weight than one coming from an NGO. The organisers recognised that credibility, in this context, was as important as creativity.

Only after that initial layer of trust was established could the real collaboration begin.

This may be one of the strongest lessons for founders, civic entrepreneurs and city makers alike. We often think of infrastructure as roads, buildings or digital networks. Yet projects involving multiple organisations frequently succeed or fail because of a less visible form of infrastructure: the ability to build confidence between partners who have never worked together before.

Innovation, in other words, is often social before it is technological.

Seeing beyond a building’s primary function

One idea from the interview stayed with me long after we finished talking.

“We look at a church only as a place for Sunday mass,” Daiszler said. “Just as we look at a car only as something that gets us from A to B.”

It is a simple observation, but it reveals a broader pattern in the way we think about cities.

Buildings become defined by a single purpose. Schools educate. Libraries lend books. Churches host religious services. Factories produce goods.

Urban innovation begins when those assumptions are challenged.

A church can also become a place for architecture, music, dialogue, exhibitions or simply curiosity. None of these new uses diminish its original purpose. Instead, they expand the ways in which citizens relate to it.

Perhaps the greatest untapped resource in many cities is not land or funding, but imagination.

Innovation without technological spectacle

One answer surprised me.

When I asked about the role of technology, Daiszler was unconvinced that the project needed more of it.

Night of the Churches, he argued, was never intended to be a showcase for digital experiences. Its value came precisely from face-to-face encounters, conversations and shared experiences inside physical spaces.

He was equally dismissive of another common assumption—that more resources automatically produce better innovation.

With unlimited funding, he suggested, the project might actually lose some of the creativity born from constraints.

It’s an uncomfortable idea in an era that often equates scale with success.

Yet many breakthrough civic initiatives begin with modest budgets and strong ideas rather than the other way around.

Communication that invited curiosity

Another understated strength of the project was the way it was communicated.

There were no grand promises or exaggerated claims. The organisers did not try to convince people to become more religious, nor did they present the event as an extraordinary spectacle.

Instead, they offered a simple invitation: come and rediscover your city.

That message attracted audiences well beyond traditional churchgoers. Curiosity—not ideology—became the common denominator.

It is a reminder that communication can shape participation as much as the programme itself does.

A broader lesson for cities

With a second edition already planned, Night of the Churches has the opportunity to evolve from a successful cultural event into a replicable model of civic innovation.

Its greatest achievement may not be the number of visitors it attracted, but the perspective it introduced: that cities do not always need new landmarks to become more vibrant. Sometimes they simply need new ways of experiencing the ones they already have.

If that idea encourages other communities to rethink their own overlooked assets—whether churches, inner courtyards, former industrial sites or public buildings—then the project’s most lasting legacy may not be the event itself, but the mindset it inspires.

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Loïc Fel is the former sustainable development manager of BETC, one of top French advertising agencies, he is the co-founder of the Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development (COAL) and creator of Contremarques, a creative “purpose store” whose ambition is to gather a diversity of emerging brands and designers.

I’ve met Loïc in Cluj, Romania, with the occasion of La Nuit des Idées, a debate organized by the French Institute on the relation between art and ecology. I’ve talked with Loïc about the role of artists as innovators, both in the economic sector and the city.

The artist can innovate like nobody else

The interesting thing about artists is that they don’t have to succeed when they try something. It’s research, and it can take a long time. They present some artwork following this research, but they don’t have the pressure to innovate  and succeed, like people do in the technological field.

They don’t have an obligation of results. They don’t have to imagine an economical model for their innovation, it can just be about changing behaviours, making people do something together or imagine a new way of producing something, and not a way of making money. On the other hand, a company has to innovate based on an economical model and in a short time research, so it’s not the same at all. And that’s why the artist can innovate like nobody else.

Artists can discuss without an agenda, can act as neutral agents for the city

In lots of our experiments, we are proposing artists to be virtual agents when a conflict arises. Because when a company speaks to the people, the people think the company wants to sell something, when the company speaks to the authority, the authority thinks that the company wants a new right, and when the authority speaks to the citizens, they think the authority wants to be reelected and only that.

But artists don’t have an agenda, they just make artwork, and if they speak with a company, authority or citizen, they want to make something now and they’re not looking for something else afterwards. And it’s a really interesting position in this case, to be the link between the people involved in a project. 

Artists as startups, impacting the market, the economy

Because the artists have a particular relation with materials, they consider innovation differently than engineers. For example, there were different experiments in France regarding reusing the waste from old buildings getting demolished to make new ones. Different groups of artists worked on it and tried to find ways to destroy the material in little pieces and put it together into a new material strong enough to be used for new buildings.

It took 20 years, but the artists succeeded, because they had enough time to research it and reach innovation. It was first a series of artworks but eventually it became a usable product that got sold to companies as building material. The artwork project was really the startup of a new market, a solution to the ecological issues and a new economical sector for the French companies. 

Contremarques, a project of co-retailing bringing together startups

With my company, we are lobbying mostly cities and builders to imagine new neighbourhoods in a sustainable way. And in this work, we talk a lot about retail, and how we could have a new sustainable retail not only, like everywhere in the world, the same companies like Zara, H&M, etc.

We imagined a way of  working, co-retailing, bringing together little brands, like startups that can’t have their own shop by themselves. Organized as a community of startups, they can create new shops together. We’ve made our own co-retailing project, called Contremarques, bringing together startups from a single city, for example Parisian brands that produce clothes, decorations, cosmetics, beer and so on. 

Within this project, we also bring together artists to propose artworks in series, which is cheaper and affordable for everyone. It’s a new way to spread culture and art to the large public, to the public that doesn’t go into the art galleries. 

We’ve made a first experiment of co-retailing in Paris last year and throughout summer in a city in the south of France, and now we want to open multiple shops in France and in Malmo in Sweden, and then in the Netherlands.

The Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development (COAL)

12 years ago I founded COAL, an association dedicated to making the link between ecology, artwork and artists. We’ve started with an international prize, COAL prize. COAL is in charge of two European cultural programs, involving nine countries, for exchanging ideas on artwork for sustainability and to organise exhibitions.

We now have an exhibition in Dunkirk, North of France, and we lobby the authorities to change the way they use culture for the future of sustainability. The next big event will be an exhibition in Marseille accompanied by a professional meeting to work on French policies.

FabLabs in Lille, France, the World Design Capital for 2020

It’s not by chance that Lille is the 2020 World Design Capital, it’s because the city had interesting projects for many years. For example they’ve created a FabLab, with full equipment for the startupers, and everyone could go there to learn how to use the equipment, the tools, the materials and take time to create new projects.

The city made free spaces like this, and Leroy Merlin, which comes from Lille, fitted them. There were a lot of startupers using the FabLabs, the experimentation in Lille was a real success, so now every city in France has copied this project. There are now FabLabs everywhere in France.

In cities like Cluj, culture can be used as a tool to make the city better from an ecological point of view and better to live in 

Cluj has two strong points, really different and really interesting. The first is the history and the heritage. It’s a good starting point, because when you have historical heritage, you can consider the ecological one too, and you have to make the same requirements for both. 

The other strong point of Cluj is that it has a young population. And that’s a strength for the city because young people can be most easily involved in projects for the city, because they have time, more strength and are more conscious about ecology.

Cluj is in a good position for change, to get involved in ecology. I heard about the river. It seems to be a huge subject. I heard about the waste and air pollution. For each of these subjects, the change depends on the individual behavior, so it depends on the culture (not only, of course, but it’s one way to work on that).

Culture can be used by the city as a tool to change the behaviour of everyone and make the city better from an ecological point of view and better to live in. We can imagine involving artists in projects for the common spaces of the city, bringing innovation in Cluj and creating new services in the city, for the citizens.

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