The SLEEPING BEAUTY project aims to rejuvenate 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, this initiative 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 underutilized and overlooked spaces into vibrant, biodiverse areas that reconnect people with nature. This holistic, co-creative approach combines innovative design and artistic interventions, encouraging collaboration among citizens, experts, and local stakeholders. These efforts will help reshape public spaces, strengthen community ties, and foster a shared sense for caretaking of environment. By emphasizing the creative re-use and revitalization of spaces, the project will demonstrate how integrating NEB and NBS can lead to improved well-being, enhanced biodiversity, and more resilient and beautiful communities. The project’s six pilot sites will serve as showcases for replicating and scaling NBS-NEB solutions across Europe, contributing to a systemic shift in how we design, interact with, and maintain public spaces in close connection with nature and cultural heritage. The initiative promotes long-term societal transformation, focusing on strengthening human-nature relationships, cultural identity, and collective action to address pressing societal challenges like climate change. SLEEPING BEAUTY’s unique blend of artistic co-creation, sustainable spatial planning and innovation will push beyond traditional NBS approaches, setting a new gold standard for innovative, inclusive, and aesthetically compelling public spaces enabled by NEB-NBS and a new Natur-Baukultur.

The building sector is one of the key enablers to achieve low carbon economy goals for 2050. To deliver this potential, buildings need to transform from passive isolated elements to smart buildings, able to adapt to occupants needs and act as active nodes well integrated to the energy grids and other infrastructures. The 2018 revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) promotes the use of ICT and smart technology in buildings to streamline the existing rules. Smart technologies indeed play an essential role and can also trigger new business opportunities. However the market uptake and wide-scale roll-out of these solutions is slow due to challenges like engaging building occupants, connecting and managing various devices and systems, achieving optimal building operation, integrating buildings to energy markets, as well as the high fragmentation of the ecosystem. These challenges are common to projects related to the smart building topic and would be most efficiently addressed by breaking silos, sharing information and bridging the gaps between innovation, markets and policy. SmartBuilt4EU will consolidate the Smart Building Innovation Community with, at its core, EU-funded projects, and provide it with a package of supporting activities with two objectives: - facilitate the exchange of information between EU-funded projects and national initiatives in the field of smart buildings and the related business, policy and media; - coordinate contributions of the Smart Buildings Innovation Community to the SRI promotion, experimentation and implementation and the identification of R&I priorities to accelerate the roll out of smart building innovation, in line with the EPBD. The CSA brings together 5 partners plus 5 linked third parties, with solid complementary expertise and geographical coverage. It is structured in 6 work packages to reach the targeted impacts and unlock the smart building potential, with the Smart Readiness Indicator as key instrument.

The aim of this proposal is to promote and facilitate technologically, financially, and operationally mature projects from Horizon 2020 to reach deployment phase by means of developing synergies with the ETS Innovation Fund. The overall objective of H2IF is to validate such connection could be effective between promising Horizon funded R&I results and Innovation Fund for hydrogen and energy storage projects. This proof of concept will be made thanks to the scaling-up and submission of 3 projects to the Innovation Fund instrument, all of them having been selected due to their high ‘climate neutrality’ potential, their innovation degree, while already being supported by Horizon 2020.

NEB Junction collects, packages and validates stakeholder knowledge into Knowledge Gems, and makes them publicly available in an AI-supported, attractive and accessible IT Portal. We cooperate with a broad set of NEB stakeholders - and stakeholders that might not yet be interested or are traditionally excluded - using multi-stakeholder sessions, learning journeys and stakeholder assemblies. Our Monitoring System bridges cultural and creative perspectives with environmental, economic, social, health and governance aspects, making sustainable solutions more relatable and attractive to policy makers, public authorities, construction ecosystems and local communities. We connect stakeholders with the NEB Facility through NEB Coffees, mapping of R&I gaps, foresight activities and more, to distill NEB at your Fingertips - Pathways to NEB Implementation, and a Roadmap for the NEB Facility. We work with creative and cultural sectors and industries to generate a sense of belonging to NEB, combining AI-supported analysis with human reflections on NEB values, needs and expectations in a co-design approach. All of this work is supported by a Vision co-created with the stakeholders, enabling its long life-time also after the end of the project. The NEB Junction is created and managed by 8 experienced NEB partners: AIT, Ars Electronica, Climate KIC, DemSoc, DOWEL, ERRIN, ICLEI, and NTNU as Project Coordinator.

Industry demands to reduce the weight of components in order to increase productivity and energy efficiency have led to the development of embedded functional electronics solutions to reduce the weight and volume of smart products. The Sustainable Development Goals balance the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental). SUINK will focus its developments on meeting sustainability indicators along the entire value chain (design, manufacturing, use and end-of-life) The main objective of SUINK is to design and implement sustainable, flexible and printable self-charging power systems (SCPS) able to supply power to a wide range of sensors. This SCPS will be formed by sustainable elements: 1) a piezoelectric energy generator to harvest electrical energy from mechanical vibrations based on pìezoelectric PLA, 2) a rectifying system as a connection circuit with 3) a fully printed biobased supercapacitor as energy storage component. The overall solution will be based on the proper combination of biobased conductive, dielectric and piezoelectric inks that will be applied by inkjet printing, a high throughput and easy-to-implement process, on biobased flexible substrates. The printed substrates will be implemented in the following elements: 1) a PLA seat (temperature sensor), 2) a PLA bracket located inside the car, specifically in the windscreen of the car (temperature/humidity sensor) and 3) a thermoset composite (strain sensor). The foils will be used for the creation of in-mold structural electronics through a) plastic injection over moulding; b) one-shot hybrid textile and c) autoclave/sheet moulding processes, towards the development of multifunctional components meeting the requirements of the automotive. SUINK will consider not only the sustainability during the design, manufacturing and use, but also will promote the circularity at the products end of life implementing new recyclability and reusability protocols for thDFAW EW RWE