Transforming the built environment into sustainable, aesthetic, and inclusive spaces: The New European Bauhaus and Desire project lead the way
To address pressing social and environmental challenges, the Danish-led and EU-supported project DESIRE – Designing the Irresistible Circular Society – aims to create irresistible change by transforming existing urban spaces into more sustainable, beautiful, and inclusive ways of living. Desire is one of six ambitious lighthouse projects under the New European Bauhaus initiative, launched in 2021 to translate the European Green Deal into real, tangible change, bringing innovation, ambition, and creativity together to create a new vision for cities worldwide.
"Danish companies have a clear strength when it comes to the New European Bauhaus. This is because innovation, high professionalism, and creativity among the actors in the built environment stand on the shoulders of the Danish societal model."
Leading the way to a sustainable, inclusive and aesthetic future
Europe faces a significant challenge as many old buildings and urban areas require renovation or transformation to support the green transition. By 2050, at least 75% of today’s buildings will still exist, with an estimated 80 million housing units needing upgrades to nearly zero-energy buildings. This calls for inclusive and attractive sustainable practices in both new and existing spaces to ensure solutions are long-lasting and beneficial to society.
The New European Bauhaus is a creative and interdisciplinary initiative that brings together innovation, ambition, and creativity to ensure that the built environment embodies sustainability, inclusion, and aesthetics. It connects the European Green Deal to living spaces and experiences, bridging science and technology with art and culture. To ensure that a movement and real impact is created across Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has appointed an Environment Commissioner responsible for coordinating and developing work with the New European Bauhaus in the European Commission.
The New European Bauhaus reflects core Danish values which are characterised by a life-centred and creative approach to addressing real-world challenges. Danish creativity is deeply rooted in the Danish societal model built on a strong tradition of trust, social equality, and encouragement to question established norms while contributing with new and innovative ideas. A creative problem-solving approach is essential when it comes to making sustainable solutions the irresistible choice, as it helps foster a genuine desire for such solutions. This is achieved by integrating a human-centred and aesthetic approach to innovation and collaborating across sectors, contributing to meaningful partnerships that create value for humans, businesses, and the planet.
DESIRE - Designing the Irresistible Circular Society
As one of the ‘lighthouse demonstrators’ of the New European Bauhaus, the Desire project has been a two-year project exploring what makes an irresistible circular society across Europe. It aims to showcase a new vision for how we can build and live by exploring alternative ways of transforming territories across European cities through the integration of art, architecture, and design. In a common call to action, the Confederation of Danish Industry, BLOXHUB, the Danish Architecture Center, the Danish Design Center, and Creative Denmark have played a significant role in the project’s inception, contributing to a shared Danish proposal that became the Desire project, developed under three core themes:
- Creating social and inclusive housing by addressing the need for inclusive processes in the circular transformation of social housing.
- Transforming through symbiotic relationships by focusing on optimising material flows when rethinking urban landscapes in cities.
- Reconciling cities with nature by designing liveable habitats and functional ecosystems from a multispecies perspective while rebalancing ‘land use’ to accommodate resource generation and biodiversity.
"Desire reveals that when we pay attention to the specifics of a place to be transformed and apply specific lenses or principles - such as belonging, biodiversity, circularity, movement, or aesthetics - we achieve outcomes that are not only regenerative but truly irresistible."
Inspiring irresistible change and transforming urban spaces
To succeed in designing the irresistible circular society, the Desire project aims to showcase the power of making sustainability the desirable and irresistible choice while inspiring change across nations, professions, and generations. Desire addresses the major challenges faced by societies and cities, demonstrating the potential of the creative industries to solve them.
The project is powered by knowledge from eight urban transformation sites across Europe: three in Denmark, two in Italy, and one in the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Latvia, each developed under one of Desire’s three themes.
The three Danish sites in the Desire project exemplify the attempt to make sustainability and circularity the irresistible choice. Gadehavegaard in Høje-Taastrup is a challenged public housing area in dire need of revitalisation. The project involves demolishing and rebuilding housing units to create a mix of student housing, senior housing, and new private homes, addressing issues of social inequality while improving living conditions. At Kalundborg Circular Campus, a new facility for the Royal Danish Academy integrates circular economy principles into education, making it a living example of how architectural design can contribute to a sustainable future. The Garden Caretaker initiative in Herlev is unfolding alongside a large housing development, transforming a former industrial site into a residential area. The initiative is rooted in a regenerative approach to city planning and explores the integration of artistic methods in the early stages of urban development.
Based on the insights and learnings from the eight exemplary sites, the Desire project presents an ambitious and innovative way forward, ultimately creating a new economic model for Europe’s built environment. It aspires to set new standards and methods for transforming existing urban spaces through development, renovation and construction and offers cities worldwide concrete tools to transform their urban environment, providing a learning kit and learning environment based on the principles of belonging, movement, biodiversity, circularity, and aesthetics.
Founded on a belief in collective action, the Desire project aims to showcase that it is possible to drive the green transition at the necessary scale and speed by exploring how we can collectively rethink, redesign and drive new systems for a circular future.
Find more inspiration in the cases below, which exemplify Danish solutions that incorporate the mindset and values of the New European Bauhaus by building based on inclusion, sustainability, and aesthetics.
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