New European Bauhaus: Horizon Europe EU Mission in the pipeline

The European Commission proposed today a sixth Horizon Europe Mission dedicated entirely to the New European Bauhaus (NEB). If endorsed by the Member States and the community, this Mission would be added to the existing five which cover adaptation to climate change, cancer, climate neutral and smart cities, the restoration of our ocean and waters, and soils.

With a focus on research and innovation solutions, the proposed NEB mission would aim to transform neighbourhoods across Europe for the better, making them beautiful, sustainable and inclusive. These neighbourhoods should act as ‘living labs’ for innovation.

During its preparatory phase, the NEB mission will be further defined.

New European Bauhaus two years on: continuing progress

The New European Bauhaus is an interdisciplinary initiative launched in 2020 that expresses the EU's ambition of creating beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive places, products and ways of living. It is inspiring a number of bottom-up projects and initiatives that test and demonstrate NEB ideas and actions.

After two years of implementation, the initiative has made significant progress: it has its own Community of over 1,000 members active across Europe and beyond, an ‘advisory’ group made up of esteemed figures in the worlds of architecture, culture, design and sustainability, and it is inspiring a number of bottom-up projects and initiatives that test and demonstrate New European Bauhaus ideas and actions.

In these two years, several New European Bauhaus lighthouse demonstrators came into being with the initiative’s bottom-up co-creation process. Spread across Europe, the projects will provide a diversity of results that can be adapted and replicated in similar activities and demonstrators in Europe and beyond, helping to inspire future projects.

Another achievement, the New European Prizes are a special way of supporting initiatives on the ground. They give visibility to examples and concepts illustrating that beautiful, sustainable, inclusive places exist, paving the way to the future. The 2021 and 2022 editions of the New European Bauhaus prizes (more than 3 000 applications received in total) awarded a total of 38 winners. The 2023 edition received more than 1.400 applications from EU Member States and for the first time, applications for initiatives in the Western Balkans. In the context of the European Year of Skills, the Prizes also included an additional strand focused on education and learning. During the Award Ceremony on 22 June in Brussels, 15 projects were awarded.

Now is the time for the initiative to consolidate its progress in a dedicated EU Mission, which would provide more structure, a clear direction and synergies to the multitude of actions and investments that are linked to it.

The New European Bauhaus already has buy-in from nine EU programmes through dedicated or contributing calls (Horizon Europe, European Regional Development Fund, LIFE, Digital Europe, Single Market Programme, COSME, Erasmus+, Creative Europe, European Solidarity Corps) and a range of various policy areas.

The European Investment Bank is also engaged with the aim of developing New European Bauhaus investment guidelines to help start-ups and project promoters launch innovative NEB ideas on the ground.

The New European Bauhaus has already experienced, to a certain extent, how synergies can be built between R&I investments, other funding instruments and private sector investment, as well as the considerable potential for further rollout. A Mission is an appropriate tool to reinforce synergies between these programmes and Horizon Europe funding, building scale and ensuring maximum impact for the New European Bauhaus. 

Existing missions on track

The announcement comes on the day on which the performance assessment of the already existing five EU Missions under Horizon Europe was published. The assessment shows that the missions are on track to meet their 2030 ambition towards a greener and healthier continent.