Three years on, the first New European Bauhaus projects are concluding and offering valuable insights into how the policy can be continued into the next legislative term and beyond.

In 1919, the architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus art school in Weimar, Germany. Within a decade, it had become famous worldwide for its philosophy, a modernist architecture unifying the principles of art and design with mass production and function. The Bauhaus movement eventually became one of the most influential currents in modern design.

In 2021, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sought to tap into this spirit to manifest her flagship EU Green Deal in architecture, launching the New European Bauhaus policy and funding initiative shortly after the movement’s 100th anniversary. “If the European Green Deal has a soul, then it is the New European Bauhaus which has led to an explosion of creativity across our Union,” President von der Leyen has said.

Translating investments

From 2025 to 2027, an extra €125 million per year has been earmarked for the projects. The biggest challenge so far, however, has been translating these investments into highly visible projects that can be accessed and understood by the public at large.

This is why the Desire project was launched in October 2022, to work alongside eight communities across Europe to transform disused urban sites into attractive and inclusive spaces with New European Bauhaus guidance.

Since then, it has collected on-the-ground experience from these “lighthouse demonstrator” projects. It was one of six NEB demonstrator projects that have been launched, and it is the first to conclude. The results of this project were presented at the European Parliament last week.

“The Commission is very happy to see that the first of these projects is coming to an end and being able to share results with us,” Artur Carvalho, a policy officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, said at the event. “We can learn from it, and other projects can use its results.”

The Desire concluding white paper, Narratives of Irresistible Circular Futures, contains six policy recommendations for the new Commission term starting next week and the upcoming 2028-2034 multiannual financial framework, which policymakers will soon be deciding on.

Embedding principles in procurement

The white paper calls on NEB principles and criteria to be embedded in EU funding programs and public procurement policy.

“When the public procurement directive and guidelines are revised, it ought to be considered to include NEB-aligned criteria,” it says. It calls for monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to be set up to assess the impact of NEB-aligned projects from a lifecycle perspective, ensuring they meet specific sustainability and inclusiveness targets.

It also calls for EU policy to encourage the adoption of circular economy models in urban planning, dedicate funding for supporting research and innovation in sustainable urban design, and provide technical assistance to national governments in the form of NEB taskforces.

Representatives from NEB-aligned urban development projects, which were part of Desire, spoke at the event. Diana Krabbendam from “The Beach” project in the Netherlands noted that one of the biggest challenges citizens working on their project encountered was municipal bureaucracy.

“Unfortunately, necessary collaboration with departments of the municipality often slows down implementation of the plans,” she said. “Citizens need support with this.”

Sustainable goals

Ana Struna Bregar, from CER, a Slovenian sustainable business network which has been working with companies to explain the Bauhaus goals, said a key challenge they encountered was with financing for renovation projects.

“We started speaking to financial institutions for them to see the potential, but we need to discuss with owners, tenants, and the EU who is providing financial support to convince them that these renovations can be stable.”

Kaare Stokholm Poulsgaard from the Danish architectural research consultancy 3XN/GXN noted that a key challenge for encouraging sustainable renovations rather than new builds is that the market is currently creating perverse incentives to demolish old buildings rather than renovate them.

“What we’re seeing is the flight to quality – the notion that in commercial real estate, super sustainable office buildings with bells and whistles are performing well, attracting tenants with low vacancy and high leases,” he said.

Stokholm Poulsgaard added: “Everything else is dropping off. Older buildings, even ones that are ten or 20 years old, are now obsolete before their time. This nervousness about the base of the real estate model means we’re getting a lot of questions about how we make sure projects are future-proof.”

Advancing Bauhaus concept

So, how can these experiences inform the Commission’s Bauhaus work going forward?

Jutta Kastner, a policy officer with the Commission’s Education, Youth, Sport and Culture department, told attendees that the Bauhaus concept is spread across various fields in the Commission’s thinking but can be constrained by the limits of what is an EU competence.

“We’re working on architecture policy, but very much under subsidiarity,” she explained. “It’s considered one of the culture and creative sectors, so we’re supporting through the Creative Europe program and Erasmus.”

She said that they have been working closely with the Davos Alliance in Switzerland, where culture ministers signed up to sustainable architecture criteria.

Rasmus Nordqvist, a Danish Green MEP, said at the conference that he expects the experiences from these projects documented in the white paper to be reflected in upcoming guidelines coming over the next term. “From the political side, both European but also national and local, we need to be quite clear on what it is we want,” he told the attendees.

Nordqvist remarked: “If we have clear guidelines, we know the private sector will join along. This question about demolishing buildings just to build new ones is totally unsustainable.”

“The EU needs to be more active about stepping in and saying no. The idea of taking down buildings because we need changes should be in the past. We need to renovate what we have. It might be more expensive, but we have other bottom lines to take into account as well.”

“We need to move much faster and further on all political levels in order to create the urban spaces we need now and in the future,” he added.

[Edited By Brian Maguire | Euractiv’s Advocacy Lab ]

Source: Euractiv.com