LFE’s Pecha-Kucha at the 1st NEBA Conference in Barcelona
At the first NEB Academy conference in Barcelona, Living Future Europe presented insights from the EHHUR project—one of the first six New European Bauhaus Lighthouse demonstrators. Across seven cities and seven countries, EHHUR set out to test a simple but demanding question: what does it take to translate NEB values into real urban transformation?
The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not a lack of ambition.
Across all Lighthouse districts, municipalities showed strong commitment. Communities engaged actively. Technical solutions were available. Through Work Package 4, led by LFE, over 300 regenerative and sustainable projects worldwide were analysed, with 30 selected based on rigorous technical, social, and financial criteria. Many of these originated from the Living Future certified projects database, providing a robust, performance-based foundation.
Beyond analysis, the project delivered practical tools. The EHHUR Decision Support System was designed to help cities combine technical options, financial models, and engagement strategies into structured decision pathways. In other words, the project did not stop at vision—it aimed at operationalisation.
And yet, across diverse contexts, a consistent pattern emerged.
The core challenge was delivery.
In Izmir, innovation encountered procedural complexity linked to heritage protection and multi-layered approvals. In Høje-Taastrup, technically sound energy-community models required alignment across administrative departments to move forward. In Sobreiro, strong co-design processes generated social ownership—but long-term continuation depended on institutional space. At the same time, the successful launch of a Local Energy Community in Nepi demonstrated that when governance aligns, implementation accelerates.
These are not isolated cases. They point to a structural condition.
The primary barrier is not technological capacity, nor community engagement. It is institutional design.
Public systems—particularly procurement frameworks—are optimised for risk minimisation, compliance, and predictability. Regenerative transformation, by contrast, requires managed experimentation, iterative learning, and cross-sector integration. When these two logics meet, friction is inevitable.
Encouragingly, change is already underway. In Osijek, NEB values were integrated directly into public tender documents, transforming sustainability, inclusion, and beauty from aspirational principles into contractual criteria. This signals that institutional evolution is not only necessary—it is possible.
The implication is clear: scaling the New European Bauhaus is not primarily a technical challenge. It is an institutional one.
Transformation scales when engagement translates into contracts, when finance aligns with long-term value, when procurement rewards integration, and when monitoring systems enable continuous improvement. In this context, municipal capability—cross-disciplinary teams, lifecycle thinking, and integrated evaluation tools—must be understood as strategic infrastructure.
EHHUR has shown that the tools exist, the ambition is present, and early examples of institutional innovation are already visible. The next step is clear: moving from demonstration to norm requires advancing to the level of institutional evolution.
And that is a shared responsibility.
