Boost for Small Municipalities: All applications

Since 2022, Vallières-les-Grandes has been reimagining its riverbanks as a community-based, natural public space. A participatory process shaped this transformation, balancing social inclusion, biodiversity, and cultural life. With new leisure areas, a guinguette, and cyclist-friendly facilities, the project fosters well-being and sustainability, embodying a rural version of values of the New European Bauhaus with its motto claiming for “living, shared public spaces”!

The EPIC-CP project is being led by the Communauté de Communes des Collines du Perche, based in Mondoubleau (population 1,300). The aim of the project is to build a new school that will bring together 4 old sites. The building will be PassivHaus certified, and the project has been the subject of a participative process involving all the relevant stakeholders. Multidisciplinary, it advocates a teaching approach that is both innovative and rooted in the area's natural and cultural heritage.

The initiative creates consumption-free meeting spaces for young people, strengthens participation, and raises awareness of building culture. In school workshops, young people explore local structures and vacant spaces, develop concepts for a youth meeting point, and acquire design, craft, and social skills through hands-on implementation on-site. This model promotes personal responsibility. A sense of community and sustainable building culture strengthen regional identity and self-efficacy.

The old town of Rutigliano is rich of historical-architectural monuments but over the last 30 years has experienced a process of abandonment.Since 2019, the reactivation of the historic center has been started, through hardware and software interventions, then included within the Commercial and Artisan Recovery Plan of the Old Town and in the Meet a Rutigliano program. The strategy includes the reactivation of abandoned spaces, through tax incentives, promotion actions and community activation.

This abandoned foundry site was a major source of employment from the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, but socio-economic crises in the 1980s led to its decline. La Manufacture, our project with Artis’up is transforming this historic site into an inclusive and community-driven manufacturing hub, with shared tools for businesses, citizens, and associations to create, transform, and recycle materials while fulfilling collective needs.

Casèlo revitalizes a historic dairy house in Levico Terme, transforming it into a cultural and educational hub. Blending tradition and innovation, it offers hands-on cheese-making, heritage storytelling, and sustainability-focused training. Engaging locals, students, and professionals, Casèlo fosters intergenerational exchange, supports local farmers, and promotes eco-friendly practices. A vibrant space for learning, taste, and community, it bridges past and future in the Alpine region

This initiative revitalizes the unique natural features of the Arroyo de la Peñuela by restoring and rehabilitating its green corridors. By blending nature-based solutions with inclusive design, the project promotes ecological conservation and sustainable enjoyment of the landscape—embodying the spirit of the New European Bauhaus.

The Requalification of Cantos River Park aims to transform a degraded area into a sustainable, inclusive, and aesthetically engaging space in Espinheiro. By restoring the Cantos River, enhancing biodiversity, and upgrading sports and leisure areas, the project fosters community well-being, environmental education, and social cohesion. Designed with local input, it exemplifies NEB’s principles of beauty, sustainability, and togetherness, making Espinheiro a model for participatory regeneration.

The Ciné Quartier project aims to create the first open air autonomous micro-cinema in France, dedicated to short films. This multi disciplinary project gathers art, collective action, eco-citizenship to revitalize a sector of the city of Val de Briey and to bring a new cultural equipment made by and for the inhabitants. It deals with ecological transition, tactical urbanism, senior and disabled inclusion. Vote for our initiative!

The project in Langau aims to revitalize a vacant former gas station as a vibrant community space. It is part of the local development strategy, involving residents and young people from the "landuni" developed vacancy strategies in a participatory process. The goal is to create an inclusive meeting place for planingworkshops that fosters social, cultural, and economic life, strengthening community ties and setting an example for rural innovation. Refuel is a metapher for the former gas station.