In 2020, the New European Bauhaus (NEB) was launched by the European Commission as a movement inviting actors across the built environment to work together in shaping life-centred, attractive environments for all European citizens.
Author: Ruxandra Aelenei, European Urban Initiative expert for SOFTacademy project
Translating NEB into practice
The European Urban Initiative (EUI) saw in this an opportunity to encourage cities to seek solutions to their challenges at the intersection of innovation, sustainability, aesthetics and inclusiveness. It therefore launched its first call for proposals for Innovative Actions supporting projects that deliver real-life examples of the New European Bauhaus.
While not prescriptive, the call encouraged cities to tailor their proposal, looking at four main topics:
- Construction and renovation in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality
- Preserving and transforming cultural heritage
- Adapting and transforming buildings for affordable housing solutions
- Regenerating urban spaces
These themes reflect both the NEB’s ambition to reimagine living spaces and the practical urban challenges European cities face, from environmentally sustainable building practices to socially inclusive public spaces.
The 14 selected projects are now in full swing, entering their third implementation year, with tangible results already being available to share and learn from. The diversity of the projects, the scales at which they operate, the topics, and the approaches reflect the versatile nature of the NEB framework. From repurposing and retrofitting unused non-residential buildings into multi-unit housing in Budapest (HU) and Fuenlabrada (ES), to implementing self-sustaining nature-based solutions (NbS) in the historical centre of Lorca (ES), or transforming a wider area within a mono-functional modernist neighbourhood in Tallinn (EE), the Call 1 EUI-IA projects build bridges between various disciplines, strengthen social cohesion, and ensure that the green transition leaves no place and no one behind.
NEB as a possible tool to navigate the housing crisis
The housing crisis is a pressing issue in many parts of Europe, which is why the AHA project in Budapest, as well as SHARE in Fuenlabrada, focus on creating affordable, inclusive and sustainable housing solutions for vulnerable groups, by repurposing unused school buildings. While both projects use NEB as a starting point for their interventions, their approaches differ.
The EUI AHA project in Budapest is also working towards creating affordable housing by transforming an unused building, taking a slightly different approach to putting NEB values and principles into practice. The innovation lies in the creation of a so-called NEB Cookbook – an Interior Design Catalogue containing compatible, easily manageable, cheap, and green ideas in maintaining and refurbishing flats. It provides current and future tenants with a versatile collection of design solutions, templates and layouts that are functional, low-cost and aesthetically pleasing, with a strong emphasis on modularity, standardisation and prefabrication. The NEB Cookbook is meant to be more than a design guide; it is a tool to democratise access to quality design and living, enabling tenants to customise their living spaces according to their needs, in an affordable manner, fostering a sense of ownership and agency, and empowering tenants to participate in improving their living environment.
The EUI SHARE project exemplifies local efforts to translate the NEB vision into concrete practices by launching, in 2024, a pan-European architectural competition that used NEB as a guiding framework. The innovative approach lay in the inclusion of the NEB values and principles as formal evaluation criteria of the architectural solutions. This approach ensured that the received proposals were not only of aesthetic high quality but also helped create an inclusive and participatory design process, requiring the selected team to hold up to six workshops or meetings across various design and construction phases. Moving beyond traditional top-down architectural processes sets a precedent for designing and creating buildings that are truly responsive to the needs and aspirations of their future inhabitants. While the competition winners have already been announced, the focus is now on bringing NEB closer to designers, municipal employees, and inhabitants, and on shaping a shared vocabulary for quality and inclusive housing.
Enhancing the quality of public space through NEB approaches
The SOFTacademy project in Tallinn aims to develop, test, and scale up a model for the collaborative reinvention of modernist districts into cosy living environments, while accelerating the renovation of deteriorating housing stock. The SOFTacademy pilot operates in a mono-functional urban setting where different uses – living, working, commerce, education – are separated. This lack of diversity in spatial solutions and public functions results in a fragmented public space that does not adequately support community life or varied user needs. To tackle this, a multidisciplinary team is working, among others, on developing a catalogue of NEB-inspired solutions. The result is a comprehensive catalogue of solutions at different scales, public or private, long- or short-term, specifically geared to mono-functional modernist areas, supporting the overarching goal of improving the everyday lives of people. It provides homeowners, cities, architects, and other specialists with design guidelines and measurable quality criteria anchored in the local context. The catalogue is adaptable to modernist areas with multiple homeowners and city-owned land, making it a valuable tool for cities across Europe.
In a different part of Europe, the city of Lorca is also working to improve the quality of public space through its NatUR-W project, focusing on the climate-adaptive, socially inclusive transformation of Barrios Altos at the intersection of heritage, ecology, and community life. In the spirit of NEB, Lorca is creating an urban forest, bringing aesthetic quality to its city centre while providing a robust climate that encourages social interaction and togetherness. The solutions proposed are the result of a wide public consultation with stakeholders from various walks of life, a process that will be repeated several times to ensure wider participation. NatUR-W exemplifies the ambition to transform outdated infrastructure into a hybrid, multifunctional civic-ecological space that combines environmental education, cultural programming, social interaction, and climate adaptation. In this sense, the ambition of Natur-W is not only to deliver green infrastructure, but also to co-design the governance and activation model that will determine how the urban forest is lived, managed and sustained over time.
Lessons learnt and next steps
While the visionary nature, openness, and adaptability of the NEB framework can inspire innovation and creativity, they also create ambiguity and challenging conditions, requiring constant renegotiation among stakeholders, as well as flexibility and resilience.
Across Europe, the EUI NEB demonstrators are showing how these challenges can be turned into opportunities. They are contributing to the operationalisation of the NEB values and principles by translating them into measurable and understandable criteria, practical tools, procedural and evaluation frameworks. In doing so, they are making the NEB framework a powerful tool for prioritising complex choices, opening up dialogue about competing interests, and ultimately improving the quality of life for all.
All 14 EUI NEB demonstrator projects are continuing their journey until mid-2027, further shaping and refining this approach. Their experience will provide a legacy that will be useful to all cities willing to embrace the New European Bauhaus as a working method to drive urban innovation.
Because beyond projects and frameworks, the NEB is ultimately about reimagining how we live together.