#NewEuropeanBauhaus “Building beautiful, sustainable, inclusive places to live together after the pandemic”
Just for
once, I’m going to write about what is going to happen in the coming days
rather than about last month’s highlights.
On 21st
April, Energy Cities’ members will discuss with the Co-President of the Club of
Rome its recent report and proposal to seize the European
Green Deal as a genuine opportunity to change our economies. The report was published in October 2020 and lays
down a real roadmap for the recovery plans.
Faced with the
rapid changes needed and the inability to anticipate future crises, like the
one we are facing now, we clearly need more agility and a new compass to guide
our policies. Energy Cities wants to broaden its vision and adapt its mission
to this new context in order to better navigate the next decade. This is why Sandrine
Dixson Declève, from the Club of Rome, is going to help us redefine our
priorities for action through a discussion with our member cities.
Energy
remains the crux of the matter since our landscapes, cities and lifestyles are
still shaped by fossil and fissile energy sources. But to transform our local
economies and the energy they feed upon, we need more than one lever: all
resources must be preserved or regenerated. To better harness the interactions
between energy and the structuring resources, i.e. materials, food and public
space, we need to develop an approach to interdependencies. We must work on
local ecosystems and surpass the energy-centred sectoral approach. This is why
we have signed a strategic agreement with ACR+, the association of cities and
regions for sustainable resource management, to reinforce the synergies between
sectors and to combine our forces. It is the first partnership in a long series
that will reinforce our collective expertise and will open up new opportunities
for our members.
The
President of the European commission has just launched a hybrid initiative, an institutional
and political UFO: the #NewEuropeanBauhaus. This initiative is based on a realisation
that we share: it is time to rethink the places where we live, how we live in
them and who has access to them to transform our societies. And it is because there is no single answer
but multiple ones, as many as there are places in fact, that reinventing public
spaces involves launching local “conversations”.
I attended
one of them organised by the Mayor of Seville. It was striking to hear so many contributions
and ideas come out of a purely institutional framework! Very open questions and a common framework for
discussing them not only make sense but are also the materials of possible
common narratives for the future. There
are no big cities or small towns, experts or elected representatives, just
residents who share a common space and who are seeking to define a desirable
future. This is sufficiently unusual to be noted (even though the trend towards
cross-sectoral programmes is gaining momentum, like this experimental programme by ADEME in the
Ile-de-France Region) and
to encourage our members to take an active part in the conversation.
But
European institutions must be ready to draw their own conclusions, that is, to
review all the budgetary lines and policies so that they genuinely support the
emergence of such shared visions. And when we look at the recent assessment of national recovery plans made by CAN Europe, there is no choice but to accept that
the change has to be drastic since, for the time being, the projects they
intend to support are a very long way from adopting a systemic, multi-sectoral
and really transformative approach.
We will
meet again on 21st April in the morning to discuss these points before we
engage in multiple conversations about the #NewEuropeanBauhaus objective “Building beautiful, sustainable, inclusive
places to live together after the pandemic”!
The post #NewEuropeanBauhaus “Building beautiful, sustainable, inclusive places to live together after the pandemic” appeared first on Energy Cities.
Fuente: ENERGY CITIES
Enlace a la noticia: #NewEuropeanBauhaus “Building beautiful, sustainable, inclusive places to live together after the pandemic”
