2024–2025 New European Bauhaus quality criteria for sustainable urban development

The aim is to develop criteria and process proposals for the evaluation of urban and town quarters. Reference is to be made to existing evaluation systems and compatibility is to be established. In addition to the already introduced sustainability criteria, aesthetics and social inclusion and, if necessary, other aspects are to be evaluated. The transformation of the entire society and economy that is necessary today should not only be an environmental and economic project, but must also become a new cultural project for Europe (von der Leyen 2020). In this sense, the mission of a climate-neutral city is necessarily linked to aesthetics and social inclusion. Today’s assessment for buildings and quarters systems focus on environmental sustainability. The innovation of this project lies in the combination of these three areas as a further development and linking of established models and in the consideration of both the criteria and the assessment methodology itself (with a focus on the interaction of the individual aspects) as well as in process proposals for use not only in the assessment, but also in project development and application. In the predecessor project NEBKrit, the Davos Baukultur Quality System (DBQS) was already applied to building assessment in the Austrian context. The proposed project will build on this model and the knowledge gained in it. A living diagram approach is to be used to implement the two central elements. The DBQS was already transferred to the Austrian situation in the course of the Fourth Baukultur Report (BMKÖS 2021). The result will be a set of criteria based on the 3 dimensions and working principles of the New European Bauhaus and the outcomes of the NEBKrit study; and process proposals for development and evaluation will be drawn up to explain how the criteria should be incorporated. The key challenges are taken into account during development: Development by diverse actors in number and form; long duration of development with ongoing changes in objectives and framework conditions; multitude of issues to be considered, which result from an extension of the assessment beyond economy and ecology and from the interaction of the diverse factors.

R&D service commissioned by FFG (Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft) for Plattform Baukulturpolitik, with Barbara Feller, Rupert Halbartschlager, Renate Hammer, Caren Ohrhallinger.