Bottom-Up NEBourhoods

Bottom-Up NEBourhoods empowers European local communities to act as urban living labs driving sustainability, aesthetic values, and social inclusion. Four distinct pilots in Helsinki (FI), Ancona (IT), The Hague (NL), and Košice (SK) deploy tailored frameworks rooted in their local contexts, bringing bottom-up approaches into real-life urban experimentation. By combining research, innovation, and practice, Bottom-Up NEB aims to move bottom-up initiatives from the margins to the core of urban transformation and generate and share knowledge across Europe.

About

Bottom- Up NEBourhoods is an international and collaborative research project funded by Horizon Europe (the EU’s funding programme for research and innovation) for the period 2026-2029. Rooted in the New European Bauhaus (NEB) framework, Bottom-Up NEBourhoods depart from the idea that conventional top-down policies and technological solutions for Europe’s ecological and social transition have proven insufficient to deliver the envisioned outcomes. Building & construction, mobility, and land use remain carbon-intensive, resource-demanding, and often misaligned with the needs and values of local communities. Meaningful transformation ideally begins at the local level—within neighbourhoods, where questions of affordability, accessibility, cultural identity, belonging, and quality of life are most tangible.

Partners

Coordinators

  • Technical University Berlin (TUB) – Germany
  • Wuppertal Institute (WI) – Germany

Research & Methodology

  • IHS, iUE (Netherlands) – Urban Living Labs
  • CBS (Denmark) – Evaluation
  • HCU (Germany) – Design & Built Environment
  • SIN (Norway) – Scale-up
  • UN-Habitat (Kenya) – Replication

Pilot Leads

  • Helsinki: Forum Virium Helsinki (FVH) + HCES
  • Košice: Creative Industry Košice (CIKE) + TUKE + ETP
  • Ancona: Municipality of Ancona
  • The Hague: Townmaking Institute (TM) + DEEL + Municipality

Design & Communication

  • forty five degrees Studio (FFD) – Germany

Project Partners

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