From December 11th and throughout January, the Official Association of Architects of the Region of Murcia (COAMU) is hosting an exhibition on the LIFE BAUHAUSING EUROPE program. The exhibition offers a journey that allows visitors to reimagine public spaces from the perspective of the European Commission’s New European Bauhaus initiative.
Sustainability, beauty, inclusion, and citizen participation are made tangible through photographs, plans, and other exhibition materials that immortalize the urban rehabilitation and regeneration projects being carried out in five European municipalities, two of which are in Murcia: Cartagena and Blanca.
Adazi in Latvia, Varazdin in Croatia, and Erzsebetvaros in Hungary are also included, all of which are members of an international consortium managed by the Spanish consulting firm EuroVértice, which specializes in urban planning, sustainable development, and territorial transformation. Together with the City Council of Murcia and the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, EuroVértice is a member of the local chapter UrbActivistas, a public-private co-creation network that has been operating since December 2024.
Thanks to the financial support of the European Union’s LIFE Program for the Environment and Climate Action, these localities are committed to innovative ideas that arise from architecture competitions and come to fruition through pilot actions focused on transforming built environments, improving energy efficiency, and strengthening social cohesion from a local and co-created perspective.
The proposals are also reinforced with technical support from multidisciplinary profiles from the Higher Technical School of Architecture and Building at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, the Latvian energy consultancy Ekodoma, the Green Building Council of Croatia, and the Budapest art hub Pro-Progresione, which work according to the guidelines of a participatory methodology.
In each municipality, the initiatives will be carried out over a four-year period, which began in 2023 and will end in 2027. Among them, the participatory renovation of the Barrio de la Concepción social center in Cartagena stands out. To implement the New Bauhaus philosophy in its development, in addition to a project competition that was open last year, neighborhood workshops are being held to identify the main needs of each community. This process allows for energy, environmental, health, and usage upgrades.
Of course, the aim is to promote a pluralistic space for coexistence that also has all the necessary facilities and green areas to enhance the quality of time spent there by visitors. Alongside this proposal, another one stands out in the municipality of Blanca, which is renovating its IDOL Center, an important landmark of industrial heritage, to give it a new life as a cultural space: new modular furniture, passive strategies to reduce energy demand, and the incorporation of indoor vegetation as a great backdrop for events.
