The New European Bauhaus Initiative. Culture at the center and a new rationale for public policy

Abstract

The New European Bauhaus (NEB) is an interdisciplinary initiative launched in 2020 that expresses the European Union's ambition of “creating beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive places, products and ways of living”. The NEB “is a creative and transdisciplinary movement in the making: (i) It is a bridge between the world of science and technology, art and culture; (ii) It is about leveraging our green and digital challenges to transform our lives for the better; (iii) It is an invitation to address complex societal problems together through co-creation”. This European Initiative places culture at the center of the process of defining public policy, and assumes culture as a new epicenter from which future development processes should be conceived. To this end, the NEB is building functional strategic links with a wide range of EU programs, namely the following: Horizon Europe, European Regional Development Fund, LIFE, Digital Europe, Single Market Programme, COSME, Erasmus+, Creative Europe, European Solidarity Corps . The NEB therefore constitutes an innovative approach in seeking to contribute to finding new answers to the societal challenges that European and global society face today. In this paper, we will analyze how the NEB is giving rise to a new development paradigm that assumes culture as the engine for building future societies, as well as a new multidisciplinary rationale and transpolicy action for public policies.