Since 2019, it has invited photographers and visual storytellers from around the world to look at cities closely — attentive to their layers, tensions, contradictions and everyday possibilities.

The award was created by CitiesToBe — the urban think lab by Anteverti, a Barcelona-based urban innovation consultancy — from a conviction that has guided our work from the beginning: that artistic creation is one of the most powerful ways to understand, question and reimagine contemporary urban life.

Through the CitiesToBe Photo Award, we support photographers who place the city at the centre of their practice, and we give visibility to images that resist simplification: work that moves beyond surface narratives to reveal what cities actually are — not as infrastructure or backdrop, but as lived, contested, layered experience.