Introduction

In September 2020, the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, presented the New European Bauhaus (NEB) in her State of the Union speech as an initiative to bring the European Green Deal into the everyday life of citizens. The aim is to show tangible experiences in which culture and innovation are put at the service of sustainability.

In this sense, one of the basic principles of the NEB is to involve society in the elaboration of public policies through direct participation. For this reason, it is considered fundamental to join together citizens, experts, companies and institutions around specific projects. To this it must be added that, following the working philosophy of the old German school of architecture and design from which it takes its name, the New Bauhaus considers that form and function are not opposed, that is, that projects can be sustainable, useful for their users and at the same time maintain an important aesthetic value inspired by art and culture. If we add to all of the above (sustainability, inclusion and beauty), interdisciplinarity, creativity and transversality, we have the pillars of both the NEB and the European project LIFE Bauhausing Europe, coordinated by the Spanish company EuroVértice.

‘Bauhausing’, a working methodology inspired by the New European Bauhaus

The NEB initiative is so important for the European Union that the funds that feed it come from different programmes, notably Horizon Europe, LIFE and the European Regional Development Fund.  In this case, the Bauhausing Europe project places special emphasis on circularity and sustainability, which is why it is co-financed by the European Commission through the LIFE Programme.

The main objective of the project, which started in October 2023 and is being developed in five municipalities in four different countries, is to use the rehabilitation and reimagining of an emblematic public building to generate a community movement that promotes circularity initiatives, both social and environmental, in the surrounding area. To achieve this, an innovative working methodology has been defined that aims to involve as many social agents as possible throughout the process. Under the name of 'Bauhausing', the objective is to highlight the citizen dynamism that the New European Bauhaus implies.

Figure 1. Methodological diagram of the social innovation toolkit

In the first stage, which is currently in progress, the project focuses on forming a local working group that is representative of the people living in the neighbourhood. In order to identify who could be part of it, each local partner has completed a stakeholder mapping exercise. Having located the people and groups who have something to contribute, whether they are current or potential users, an effort was made to understand how they relate to the neighbourhood and its building. To this end, interviews were carried out and a diagnosis was drawn up, which was then shared with the community itself.

Bauhausing Europe takes place in Spain (Cartagena and Blanca), Croatia (Varazdin), Hungary (Erzsébetváros district in Budapest) and Latvia (Adazi). In other words, the project takes place in four very different countries and in environments ranging from rural to large cities and almost uninhabited spaces. Diversity is also maintained in the buildings, from an old fruit warehouse to a historic theatre. For this reason, the adaptation of each of the techniques to each local reality is considered fundamental.

Figure 2. The five buildings on which the project works

The local working groups are the basic governance unit of the project. Open to anyone who wants to be part of them, they carry out the process of public reimagining of the buildings, but also a process of reimagining the public space and the involvement and training of the rest of the community. Regarding the former, co-creation workshops are carried out with the working group to identify the current and potential users of the building. In fact, in a participatory and even playful way, the steps of a design project (design thinking) are followed: exploration, ideation, prototyping and testing.

The aim is to collectively complete worksheets that collect information about the users, to locate on a plan of the building the places they use or should use, to establish their needs, to prioritise them and, finally, to design and contrast prototypes made with homemade materials.

A technical project supported by the public

The results of the workshops, converted into a technical report, together with the results of a survey open to all citizens in which the current state of the building, possible interventions and future uses of the building are evaluated, will be the main inputs of a panel of experts. In this phase of the project, the challenge will be to transform what the citizens have identified into a technical rehabilitation project for the building that responds to the needs of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, but also to the environmental sustainability objectives of the New European Bauhaus and the technical requirements of an architectural rehabilitation.

The role of the experts, through a co-creation workshop, will be to design the basis for an open ideas contest. The aim of the meeting will be to generate a battery of ideas that will serve to solve the challenge posed by the local working group, trying to go beyond the most apparently pragmatic and realistic solutions, i.e. creativity and innovation will be valued, both in construction techniques and in solutions based on circularity (both in construction and in future dismantling) or in the collective identity of the area.

Figure 3. Stages of the ideation phase

In any case, these ideas should be used as a guideline to include in the specifications concrete terms related to an improvement in energy efficiency of more than 30 %, the architectural quality of the solutions, the level of innovation, actions related to biodiversity, the life cycle and efficiency of materials, the use of water resources or the generation of healthy and comfortable spaces, including lighting, acoustics, thermal comfort and indoor air quality.

Following the NEB philosophy, this group, whose members will be selected by the local and technical partners, will have a multidisciplinary aspect, with the presence of engineers, architects, artists and technicians from local administrations. It should be noted that among the technical partners there are entities of such different profiles as the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, the artistic collective ProProgressione, the consultancy specialised in energy efficiency Ekodoma, the Croatian Green Building Council or the consultancy specialised in European funding EuroVértice, which is the one leading the project. This team will in turn be in charge of choosing the winning project.

Circular neighbourhoods

We cannot forget that the ultimate goal of the project, like that of the NEB itself, is the transformation of the communities towards more sustainable, aesthetic and inclusive models. In other words, the ultimate goal is the transformation of the five neighbourhoods into more sustainable, beautiful and circular territories co-governed by their inhabitants.

In this sense, two of the specific objectives are to improve the urban metabolism of the intervention areas and to reinforce the sense of community and belonging in the selected neighbourhoods, which would demonstrate that this approach is suitable for the transformation of any territory regardless of its size, rural or urban character, urban challenges or degradation processes.

In this last stage, the improvement of public space will be carried out, for example, through the construction of urban gardens, through a characteristic intervention in each area that will serve as a pilot project of sustainability for its inhabitants.

In these places recovered for the citizens, activities chosen and even carried out by the local working groups will be developed to train and disseminate the values of the New Bauhaus among their fellow citizens, while at the same time intervening in a direct improvement of the conditions of the environment.

Conclusion

The LIFE Bauhausing Europe project has developed a flexible methodology that, it is expected, can be adapted to all circumstances to serve as a reference for the development of the philosophy of the New European Bauhaus in neighbourhoods across the continent. Using innovative collaborative tools, this new approach will make it possible to act from the level of the architectural restoration of a building to that of the renovation and revitalisation of a neighbourhood, including both the more technical field and that related to training and public awareness.