DESIRE – Designing Irresistible Cities.

A New European Bauhaus project. Supported by Eu Horizon 2020.

“Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or CINEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.”

Changing the narrative of the future in the built environment.

From October 2022 to November 2024, Really Regenerative CIC participated as one of 22 diverse partners in the New Eurpean Bauhaus programme, DESIRE.

DESIRE was created to explore the enabling conditions for transformation to irresistible circular places across 8 different urban environments in Europe: Kalundborg and Herlev in Denmark, Amsterdam, Riga, Ljubljana, Cascina Falcera and Milan.

The collective worked alongside communities across Europe, making European citizens pivotal to our work. The insights gathered are not just research outcomes but a rallying call for a renewed urban policy agenda for embracing citizens in Europe’s urban transformation.

We played a key role in introducing regenerative design and development into the collective, and are proud to have ‘transformed the language’ of the collective through our introduction of key living systems premises such as systems evolution, the focus on activating the evolutionary potential of places rather than problem-solving, understanding dynamic nested relationalships across systems, and above all, the critical focus of building right relationship between multi-stakeholder communities before embarking on tasks.

We worked with Kalundborg and Herlev teams, and were joined in the 2023 Power of Place cohort by members of the Kalundborg and Riga teams.

Whole field engagement is key to the future.

We have shown that the transition to a sustainable, inclusive and vibrant Europe hinges on one core principle: citizen engagement. We have learned that real, lasting transformation comes from place-based change, where collaboration among designers, artists, architects, municipalities, and local communities can play an important role. In summary, it is about three things:

👉 Creating sustainable futures through deep whole field engagement is the way.

👉 Designing urban spaces for Trust and Ownership is vital.

👉 Innovation through Art, Design and Participatory Democracy is critical.

In Kalundborg, with the support of Really Regenerative CIC, the initiative focused on listening to the place and learning from its history. This approach created trust and ownerships and sparked ideas for essential place-based changes.

Artistic and design practices are key to engaging communities and transforming places. An example is the Garden Caretaker in Herlev, Denmark, where artists used various methods like fictional writing, sculpting, performance, and audio walks to deepen connections between stakeholders and non-human beings. The urban farming site Cascina Falchera near Torino also lets an artist speak to new audiences with the desire to connect people with nature.

In the MIND Milano Innovation District, prominent yellow “Desire benches” follow the thoughts in a ‘Beauty for All’ framework to help decision-makers incorporate beauty and inclusiveness when expanding the area’s enormous main street Decumano.

Learnings from the social housing area, Gadehavegaard in Høje-Taastrup (Denmark) show that if you customize co-creation processes to involve young people you may end up with completely new and wild ideas

The Garden Caretaker

A creative intervention in Herlev, Copenhagen

In 2021, Madeleine Kate McGowan joined our signature learning journey Power of Place. Her journey with us convinced her that our voice was needed within the New European Bauhaus movement and so we were invited into the DESIRE consortium.

The arts and urban development project “The Garden Caretaker” is an interdisciplinary project that connects artistic practice, architecture, citizen involvement, urban development and the multispecies perspective. The site demonstration took place in Herlev, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, Denmark, between April 2023 and March 2024 . The Garden Caretaker aims to cultivate relationships between humans, non-humans, and their mutual local environment through its initiatives. The project investigates how the disciplines of aesthetics, urban planning, and biodiversity can drive a greener and more inclusive urban transformation.

The Garden Caretaker is a design proposal rooted in a regenerative approach to city planning and explores the integration of artistic methods in the early stages of urban development. This proposal emerged from the interdisciplinary ‘Being of Place’ methodology, which focuses on recording and mapping the unique characteristics of the site prior to its development.

The term Garden Caretaker describes an individual who, within this project, temporarily inhabits a specific location within the city. Using various artistic practices such as fictional writing, sculpting, landscape walks, performance, and music, they orchestrate, curate, and design a range of activities tailored to the site. These artistic activities are designed to foster a deeper connection between stakeholders and the natural environment, emphasizing the site-specific qualities and the symbiotic relationship between humans, flora, fauna, and the surrounding ecosystem.

Healing the Story of Separation in Kalundborg, Denmark..

Kalundborg, Denmark, located 100 km west of Copenhagen, is renowned for its thriving industrial symbiosis model, interconnecting over 20 streams of water, energy, and materials with active participation from public and private stakeholders.

Over the past five years, aligned with the Danish Government’s strategy to decentralise higher education, Kalundborg’s industrial, political, and educational stakeholders have collaborated to attract higher education institutions to the city. And now a new Circular Campus is being developed.

In this context, the Royal Danish Academy had been mandated to establish a new architecture program in Kalundborg.

In 2023 the project leader of the Kalundborg project joined our signature regenerative learning journey Power of Place. The participation in the journey enabled the team to map the history of the region and identify a critical acupuncture point of intervention for the incooming Royal Danish Architecture School – with a mission to heal the story of separation between the key stakeholders of the city – the municipality, the industrial biotech centre and the citizens.

In April 2023 we supported the team to design and organise a series of interventions beginning with a site visit and series of workshops on mapping dynamic relationships in place. We identified three critical areas of intervention:-

reconnecting the citizens of Kalundborg with nature
finding co-mutual potential relationships between citizens, the municipality and the incoming Royal Danish Architecture School
siting the Royal Danish Architecture School, not within the new campus but within the city so that engagement and presence could be experienced by the local community

With weekly support from Really Regenerative a new community field of energy was created from which was formed a civic group, The Phoenix Team.