– Reflections from the
New European Bauhaus Festival

Text by Madeleine Kate McGowan, Artistic Director at NXT

Every time I take part in the New European Bauhaus Festival, I experience a kind of sprouting tenderness towards this old continent that is my home: Europe. Like family, Europe is not simple to love. There are many things about it that spark my critique. It can feel dusty, bureaucratic, self-satisfied, and with a dark colonial past. And yet Europe is also a source of values that are dear to me, and that I take less for granted these days: diversity, inclusivity, circularity, freedom of speech, cultural richness, and critical thinking.

In a time when democratic freedoms are under increasing pressure globally, these values feel less like ideals and more like living infrastructures that need tending. According to the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, the number of democracies worldwide has declined from a peak of 95 countries in 2016 to 87 in 2025. The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA. The world has never before seen as many countries autocratizing at the same time as during the last few years of the “third wave of autocratization”¹. Meanwhile, Freedom House reports that global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. 

This gives me a strong sense of urgency. I do not take our freedoms for granted. I feel called to use the platforms I have access to – artistic, curatorial, civic – to stimulate and strengthen the democratic, ecological, and cultural imagination.

This is also how I understand the New European Bauhaus. It is a movement we should not take for granted. Rooted in the European Green Deal, it offers a framework for practitioners working with the transition of the built environment, not only through technology and policy, but through beauty, belonging, and shared responsibility. It asks how we can create societies that are sustainable, inclusive, and beautiful at the same time. Or perhaps, more deeply: how can we learn to care for places before we redesign them?

Designing from life
This year’s festival in Brussels was framed through the sequence Life, Spaces, Buildings, an approach that resonated strongly with the Danish tradition of human-centred urban thinking associated with Gehl Architects. For me, this order matters. It suggests that architecture and planning should not begin with objects, structures, or masterplans, but with life: with bodies, communities, ecosystems, habits, conflicts, and fragile forms of coexistence. What if design begins not with buildings, but with belonging?

In Ursula von der Leyen’s opening speech, she spoke about affordable housing (once more commonly referred to as social housing) as a matter of democratic health. If the current housing crisis continues to intensify, she argued, it risks destabilising the social glue of European societies. She also underlined circular economy as a question of security in a time of uncertain supply chains. Circularity is not only an environmental ambition: it is also a way of building resilience. And finally, she described inclusivity as part of the DNA of the European Union. No one should be left behind: not as a slogan, but as a condition for cohesion across Europe’s diverse populations.

Forces for regeneration
As part of the official programme, I presented NXT’s work with The Garden Caretaker developed within the New European Bauhaus DESIRE Lighthouse Demonstrator project. The project asks: What if caring for a garden is not about managing nature, but about learning to participate in it? Through artistic and site-specific processes, The Garden Caretaker explores how people can enter into more attentive relationships with place, soil, plants, insects, bats, birds, histories, and each other. It is a project about ecological care, but also about cultural change: how we move from ownership to stewardship, from design as control to design as participation.

At the festival, we met with the other first-generation New European Bauhaus Lighthouse Demonstrators, gathering over breakfast each morning in Brussels. These meetings reminded me that movements are made not only through speeches, strategies, and policy frameworks, but through repeated encounters, shared meals, informal exchanges, and the slow building of trust. The New European Bauhaus is still young, but in these moments I sensed its potential as a living network of practitioners trying to imagine Europe otherwise.

For those of us working toward regenerative futures, the questions are no longer only technical. They are emotional, cultural, relational. How do we cultivate a deeper sense of belonging? What role can art play in urban transformation? How can beauty, ecology, and community become active forces for regeneration?

I returned from Brussels with both concern and hope. Concern, because the democratic and ecological challenges we face are profound. Hope, because I saw people across Europe working with imagination, care, and seriousness to respond. Perhaps this is what the New European Bauhaus can offer at its best: not a finished model, but a shared invitation to practice Europe as something alive – something we must continue to tend, question, compost, and grow.

¹ V-Dem Institute: Democracy Report 2026. Unraveling The Democratic Era?

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MADELEINE KATE MCGOWAN