About Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty (SB) is a Horizon Europe Innovation Action supporting the New European Bauhaus (NEB) initiative, which objective is to achieve a green transition that is also inclusive and beautiful. The project will integrate Nature Based Solutions to revitalise 6 Sleeping Beauties (pilot sites across Europe) located in Riga (LV), Wroclaw (PL), Fröseke (SE), Bolzano (IT), Kozani (EL), and Collegno (IT).

The Sleeping Beauty project aims to revive neglected urban, peri-urban, and rural spaces across Europe through the integration of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) and the core values of the New European Bauhaus (NEB).

By addressing diverse climatic contexts, our project promotes sustainable, inclusive, and resilient communities. The project leverages NBS to enhance biodiversity, foster natural beauty, and provide multifunctional public spaces, aligning with NEB’s principles of sustainability, beauty, and inclusiveness.

Sleeping Beauty seeks to transform underutilised and overlooked spaces into vibrant, biodiverse areas that reconnect people and nature. This holistic, co-creative approach combines innovative design and artistic interventions, encouraging collaboration among citizens, experts, and local stakeholders.

Project Objectives

Regenerate & Re-value: Combine NEB and NBS in a creative way to restore biodiversity, improve health and well-being, build resilience, and create more inclusive communities
Re-use & Re-connect: Co-create NBS and NEB to provide fair access to shared spaces, make them multifunctional and aesthetically enriching, and ensure they are well-maintained for the future
Re-organise & Replicate: Share and apply what works in combining NBS and NEB across different climates and contexts (urban, peri-urban, rural, and protected areas). Promote a new societal vision where inclusiveness, collaboration, sustainability, and beauty become the norm and are integrated into policy

Methods

Framing & Exploring: Making NEB more concrete and hands-on for the area of NBS
Pinpointing main challenges for combining NEB-NBS in the different contexts
Providing a co-governance framework and guiding principles for methods and processes to unlock and regenerate different aspects of culture as well as for the implementation of solutions to reveal beauty and aesthetics - conduct co-creation workshops and prototyping of NEB-NbS in each pilot site
Practicing Innovation: Addressing the challenges of combined NEB-NBS by developing and implementing the solutions, supported by co-creation methods, digital tools, tactical-urbanism interventions
Upscailing & Sustaining: Provide an analysis of vital aspects to implementation of NBS + assessment of created values that were not possible to implement without NEB which leads towards replication and mainstreaming in order to establish and disseminate a new culture of “NEB-NBS as the new normal"

Barriers

Lack of awareness, urgency and willingness to engage Citizens, civil servants, urban planners and policymakers
Involved/addressed stakeholders and citizens lacking expertise & knowledge about NEB and NBS.
Interoperability issues among different systems can hamper decision-support tool application.
Slow adoption of new business models and of new contractual models including the adoption of performance-requirements
Uncertainties about co-funding of the investments related to replication and upscaled deployment plans
Difficulties to identify the best location for implementing the pilot solutions (ownership of land, hertigage regulations etc.)

Funding

Horizon Europe - Project: 101181784 — Sleeping Beauty