SUSTAINABILITY

THE GREEN REVOLUTION

The European Commission is inviting ‘creative minds’ across Europe to contribute ideas to the New European Bauhaus, an initiative to design new ways of living to meet the European Green Deal’s goals. JP Fabri explores its advantages and why Malta should use it as its next economic catalyst.

On January 18, the European Commission unveiled its plans for the New European Bauhaus initiative—an environmental, economic and cultural project aimed to design ‘future ways of living’ sustainable.In a statement, Commission President von der Leyen said that ‘the New European Bauhaus is about how we live better together after the pandemic while respecting the planet and protecting our environment. It is about empowering those who have the solutions to the climate crisis, matching sustainability with style.’

The Bauhaus was arguably the single most influential modernist art school of the 20th century. Its approach to teaching, and the relationship between art, society, and technology, had a significant impact both in Europe and in the United States long after its closure under Nazi pressure in 1933.Durability, aestheticsandinclusivenessremain the stated guiding principles of the project, inspired in the early 20th-century style of the German architect Walter Gropius, combining different elements from both fine arts and design to reflect the unity of all the arts.

Therefore, it is very apt for the Commission to see the recovery and relaunch from this pandemic as a new Bauhaus and to use this concept to implement the European Green Deal truly. We need design, architecture and artful experimentation to help create the conditions necessary for the European Green Deal, a set of policy initiatives by the European Commission with the overarching aim of making Europe climate neutral in 2050 and with a budget exceeding €540 billion, including the design and delivery of our institutions, cultures, social support and natural environments, as much as our technologies, materials and built infrastructures.

Design-led approaches to such societal challenges can be the vehicle for this work, shaping finance, governance, and social innovation-oriented around public purpose, but this will require a much deeper exchange between the design and economics fields. Knowing how to design an economy to be more inclusive and sustainable begins with understanding markets as design decisions. The New Bauhaus can be this intellectual, cultural and practical snowplough, clearing the way for these innovations and transformations. It can do this in at least three ways.

First, and most obviously, the imaginative capacity of design, art, and architecture actively creates possible futures making tangible and motivating the numerous diverse and complex scenarios implicit in the Green Deal.

Secondly, the New Bauhaus can help develop widespread literacy and toolkits for design, architecture, technology, and culture at all levels. Creating better clients, collaborators, and better designers can help transform businesses, organisations, civil service and public sectors and governments.

Thirdly, the New Bauhaus can help re-work the cultures that shape public life, such that our public and civic institutions are capable of equitably delivering resilient, healthy, vibrant and culturally rich technologies, infrastructures, cultures and places. Accessing art and design’s capacity will be vital to ensuring that we do not shirk from complexity but embrace it.

Design, art and architecture have fundamental roles to play here. They produce new ways of seeing and doing, informing and inventing new economic, cultural and political practices. A new emphasis on deep collaboration and dynamic evaluation, necessary at the core of these new practices, can draw deeply from architecture and design expertise in this regard.

The act of prototyping—of creating tangible experiences within everyday life, to simultaneously provoke discussion, derive insights, and shape the directions of possible futures—is fundamental to design and architecture practice, yet still rarely used more broadly in public life. The New Bauhaus can be the prototyping engine for almost any aspect of the Green Deal, enabling participation in far more successful and more inventive subsequent outcomes from this ‘New Wave’.

The EU Commission launched the first phase of the New Bauhaus concept in January. I genuinely believe that Malta should pioneer this and embrace the movement itself as a country and society.

The EU Green Deal offers Malta a unique opportunity to transform itself and embrace the green revolution in its new economic renewal and growth era

The EU Green Deal offers Malta a unique opportunity to transform itself and embrace the green revolution in its new economic renewal and growth era. This could be the right opportunity as we start rethinking the new normal and embracing the future’s new economic sectors. To this end, Malta can serve as a European testbed in which technologies, ideas and concepts inspired by this New Bauhaus supporting the EU Green Deal can be prototyped and tested in Malta. Prototyping the New Bauhaus itself, as a project, would enable ideas to emerge very soon, creating waves within months. Using the principles and practices of design and architecture is a sure-fire way to move quickly, practically, and in highly tangible ways.

Systems theorist Ilya Prigogine once said, ‘in an unstable complex system, small islands of coherence have the potential to change the whole system.’ Malta, it is our time to embrace the New Bauhaus and use it as our next economic catalyst.

JP is a founding partner at Seed, a multi-disciplinary advisory practice.