Time to kickoff with a new Cooperation Partnership (Erasmus+): “New European Bauhaus in Urban and ruraL Areas” (NEBULA)

The context

The New European Bauhaus initiative connects the European Green Deal to our daily lives and living spaces. It calls on all Europeans to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls.

The New European Bauhaus is a creative and transdisciplinary movement in the making!

• It is a bridge between the world of science and technology, art and culture.
• It is about leveraging our green and digital challenges to transform our lives for the better.
• It is an invitation to address complex societal problems together through co-creation.

By creating bridges between different backgrounds, cutting across disciplines and building on participation at all levels, the New European Bauhaus inspires a movement to facilitate and steer the transformation of our societies along three inseparable values:

• sustainability, from climate goals to circularity, zero pollution, and biodiversity
• aesthetics, quality of experience and style beyond functionality
• inclusion, from valuing diversity to securing accessibility and affordability

The New European Bauhaus brings citizens, experts, businesses, and institutions together to reimagine sustainable living in Europe and beyond. In addition to creating a platform for experimentation and connection, the initiative supports positive change also by providing access to EU funding for beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive projects.

The needs

The main need NEBULA aims to address is the renewal and regeneration of urban/rural areas leveraging on the most important resources communities have: young people's attitudes and ideas. In this framework, social, artistic and environmental activities are a fundamental starting point in regeneration processes as the launch of the NEB initiative demonstrates, affecting the development of collective identity and the sense of belonging to a community, allowing social inclusion, transmitting educational values, promoting social exchanges and contributing to territorial economic development.
The starting point of this project is based on the ideas promoted by the New European Bauhaus (NEB) that aims to redesign Europe, led by 3 concepts that will reshape and give new life to the environment we live in: accessibility, inclusion and sustainability. This movement has to be seen as a current of interdisciplinary subjects, connected by creativity, that will develop a new conception of meeting space, where different practices of sustainability and social inclusion are displayed. The NEB aims at being the practical conversion of the Green Deal, making cities and rural peripheries something to be lived and enjoyed also from a cultural and “experiential” point of view.
Arriving to a solution to these issues requires a multidisciplinary approach. We think that these solutions can be reached tapping into young people’s creativity provided that they own the right set of skills and with the right sources of inspiration. For this reason, the role that this project is determined to play is to stimulate and raise awareness about the initiative of the NEB, researching environmental/urban/rural regeneration case studies and analysing the business models behind already developed and successful ideas, providing a new insight into emerging youth entrepreneurial activities and their economic and social potential, showing the latent power for communities enhancement and exploitation.

Project objectives

The NEBULA specific objectives are:

1. discover and promote alternative models of urban and rural regeneration, leveraging on and inspired by the New European Bauhaus
2. promote young people’s sense of initiative and youth entrepreneurship, creativity and technique, in order to teach entrepreneurship through non-formal approach.
3. support youth creative potential, stimulate innovation and support their entrepreneurial training.
4. promote green business models around social and young entrepreneurship based on urban and rural regeneration.
5. make up a multilateral and multidisciplinary approach more sustainable by connecting young entrepreneurs, urban and rural stakeholders and local NGOs.
6. give the right tools to young people to be more proactive, energetic and bubbly in their community, to promote new local regenerating initiatives, to open a discussion table with change makers.
7. create a network of social entrepreneurs and stakeholders to share best practises about the topic all around Europe.
8. increase quality and recognition of youth innovative work in rural and urban areas to be regenerated.

Project activities

The above mentioned objectives and related priorities will be reached through a set of resources developed by the partnership of NEBULA having them in mind:

WP2 - The NEBULA Dos and Don'ts manual for young entrepreneurs
providing concrete examples and best practices of urban/rural regeneration projects.

WP3 - The NEBULA Training Programme and sharing platform
through which young people will be empowered with skills needed to successfully put their ideas into practice and youth workers will be equipped with the right methodology to transfer such knowledge to the youngsters they deal with.

WP4 - NEBULA Workshop and Roundtable - “Pitch your NEBULA model”
Contest aiming at creating a positive dialogue about the themes dealt with by the project and pushing young aspiring entrepreneurs to challenge themselves presenting their innovative ideas."