Can the New European Bauhaus reorient design to tackle the climate crisis?

By Dan Hill and Rowan Conway

This week, the EU formally launched the “New European Bauhaus” initiative. By investing in creativity it promises to be an interdisciplinary movement that will power the European Green Deal. As part design studio, part accelerator and part network, here are some thoughts on how it might succeed.

I n her inaugural State of the Union address to the European parliament, Ursula von der Leyen announced the intention to create a “New European Bauhaus”. This week she set out concrete plans for its inception, with the following bold statement:

“I want Next Generation EU to kickstart a European renovation wave and make our Union a leader in the circular economy. But this is not just an environmental or economic project: it needs to be a new cultural project for Europe.”

While this vision is hopeful, beautiful and aspirational (guided by the phrase “letting form follow planet”), its delivery must not become utopian, distant and siloed. After this clarion call to build a new future together, the intention must go beyond rhetoric and forge real partnerships, new relationships, and tangible, practical projects that tackle the tough, complex, social, economic, and environmental challenges that surround us.

Building new schools of thought

At the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), we are thrilled by the ambition of a New European Bauhaus as a catalytic school of thought and practice for the European Green Deal. With partners in Sweden, Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia and Finland, we remain distinctly European, and we are interdisciplinary by nature, having recently welcomed leading design thought leaders Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen as Honorary Professors within our growing faculty.

As an economics and public policy institute situated within a design and architecture school at the Bartlett, “designing” is central to our thought and practice. Our work seeks to redesign both the dominant discourse and change traditional practice, through our “practice-based theorising” with policy makers and our teaching in the unique Transformation by Design module as part of the IIPP MPA.

By doing this, we have learned that building new schools of thought means convening an exchange of ideas between students and teachers, artists and designers, policy makers and practitioners in the public and private sector, as well as moving sometimes radical discourse from the edges to the centre of society, connecting in public. In essence, by diversifying both the debates and the forums and formats through which they are articulated, we are experimenting with ways to reorient economic and public policy practices to tackle the grand challenges we face today.

If the New European Bauhaus is to lay the foundations for a bold new school of thought and practice, it must seek to retool Europe’s design capabilities for a mission-oriented Green Deal. This necessitates a thorough redesign of the way governments work, from continental to local. In doing so, it must address the art of framing questions, making decisions, and delivering answers — in other words, the culture and practice of design, reoriented for public purpose.

Yet this does not mean simply dropping design into existing contexts, as is often the case with lazy ‘design thinking’ approaches, but equally retooling design for this challenge, seeing it as an integrative practice for numerous other voices, perspectives and disciplines. The New European Bauhaus cannot simply apply or nurture one single sector or discipline. It must be as pluralistic as Europe is, whilst still standing for a specific and distinctive set of approaches to a Green Deal.

Navigating both the technical and the cultural

The Green Deal will not be just a technical challenge — indeed, we have almost all the technology we need to achieve many variations on a green revolution. Its core challenges, and opportunities, are behavioural, cultural, political and economic, and the most urgent concern is democratic.

We must dwell on our shared and entangled European identities, and how we make shared decisions about shared futures. We must situate meaningful work within our public and civic spaces and infrastructures, the physical and digital technologies of everyday life, understanding how they can understand, articulate, and construct public purpose, as well as produce housing, energy, mobility, conviviality and biodiversity.We must produce spaces for contestation and dialogue, and learn how to enable co-created, shared and care-for environments and places. We must move beyond simplistic user-centred approaches, and towards a life-centred design. These are the questions that face designers, heightened by our present and future conditions, richly complicated by our pasts.

To meet the promise of “connecting different realities”, the European Bauhaus must explore the creative potential of local communities and local governments themselves, and not just their consultant architects, designers, special advisors or their outsourced technology and infrastructures companies. Design can enable a holistic, relational, systemic and diverse perspective, well beyond these blunted, narrow relationships. A key focus will need to be on deep participation — well beyond simple consultation — and questions of co-design, collaboration, cooperation, and civic relationships. This approach creates more room for creative practices too, given the more diverse set of possibilities in play.

Opening up the design process and creating genuinely participatory practices just might reveal that questions of technology, built environment, product, material and service design are not unrelated to those of culture, identity, governance, but rather they are symbiotically linked: each unlocks the other.

Balances of Power

Democracy, when pursued as an open system — such as Jane Jacobs’s notion of open city, and Richard Sennett’s many profound variations on the theme — is, as Albert Camus memorably put it, “the form of society devised and maintained by those who know they don’t know everything.”

This humble tone may need to infuse the new narrative if this movement is to be both participatory as well as cross-disciplinary. These particular aspects of design — participation, collaboration and politics — are both the most critical, whilst also being arguably the most fundamentally challenging aspects of design practice.

This is not design work as usual. Designers will need to learn as well as lead. The Green Deal will take designers beyond their craft and so this “retooling” will need to be in building their understanding of how to engage citizens in defining purpose and politics (participatory structures), how to nurture organisational capabilities for design (organisational and relational competencies); how to assess the value that is created by design (dynamic and diverse evaluation); and ensure that societal and environmental value is distributed equitably (inclusive growth, for both people and planet).

If we address these challenges with courage and imagination, with transdisciplinary expertise and an open participative spirit, then the New European Bauhaus is indeed an opportunity for the reinvention of our design, art and architecture practices, just as it is for the reinvention of Europe.

In collaboration with Mariana Mazzucato and Christian Bason at the Danish Design Centre in Denmark, we build on these points in this briefing paper produced for the European Commission.

We recognise the thrill of a blank canvas, the first page of a fresh sketchbook, and a shared sense of possible futures. We wish the New European Bauhaus initiative the best of luck in all its endeavours, and look forward to rolling up our sleeves and contributing with energy and enthusiasm.

Rowan Conway and Dan Hill both teach the Transformation by Design Module at IIPP. Find out more here about the Master of Public Administration (MPA) in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value