Sustainable, inclusive and beautiful, all at once
Three residencies. Three cities. Three values of the New European Bauhaus, tested in practice.
Bringing the Green Deal into everyday life
The New European Bauhaus (NEB) is a European Union initiative that connects sustainability, inclusion and beauty — bringing the ambitions of the European Green Deal into people’s everyday lives, spaces and relationships.
CREATE PURPOSE doesn’t just talk about these values — it tests them in practice, through three artist residencies, each one built around a different NEB pillar.
Sustainability
What does a sustainable community actually look and feel like?
Sustainability runs through both the theme of the Athens residency and the way we work as a consortium. Artists and local young people will explore this question through site-specific, participatory interventions rooted in placemaking and public space.
How the project itself stays green
- Eco-friendly materials for every artwork
- No printed flyers: QR-code stickers instead
- Reusable banners made of recycled materials
- Waste sorted and recycled after every festival
- Green mobility encouraged for artists and staff travelling between countries
Aesthetics
What makes a space, or a community, truly beautiful to live in?
The Kiel residency treats aesthetics not as decoration, but as something built together — a shared, participatory act of shaping the everyday environment through design, music and movement.
Beauty, made together
Rooted in HBS’s long-standing work on cultural planning and public-interest design, this residency shows that beauty in public space isn’t handed down by experts — it emerges when a community shapes its own surroundings.
Inclusion
Who gets a voice in shaping their community — and who doesn’t?
The Bucharest residency puts inclusion at its centre, working through theatre and scenic movement with young people from diverse backgrounds, including some directly connected to placement centres and marginalised communities.
Inclusion isn’t limited to one residency, though — it shapes the whole project. Every activity, online and offline, is designed to be accessible to people of all backgrounds, abilities and genders.
of all young participants across the three countries come from underrepresented groups:
Three sides of the same future
Each residency puts one NEB value in the spotlight, but all three run through everything CREATE PURPOSE does. By the end of the project, three cities will have shown — in very different ways — that sustainability, beauty and inclusion aren’t separate goals to balance against each other. They’re three sides of the same future, and art is one of the most direct ways to build it together.