Youth 4 Bauhaus: Design Think Your City Braga

This week, more than 40 European students are in Braga with the aim of developing more inclusive and sustainable solutions for the city. This joint initiative seeks to empower young people and the educational community to respond to the transformations taking place in the cities where they live, actively and critically engaging them in different ways of using urban public space in a sustainable, green, and inclusive manner.

The initiative “Design Think Your City Braga” takes place within the framework of the European project Youth 4 Bauhaus and brings together students from Romania, Belgium, and Slovakia alongside students from Braga. The initiative serves as a platform for designing learning and development activities based on the principles of the New European Bauhaus, an environmental, economic, and cultural project created by the European Commission. This initiative aims to combine design, sustainability, accessibility, affordability, and investment in order to help bring the European Green Deal closer to citizens.

Using the popular game Minecraft, students from UNESCO Creative Cities for Media Arts — Braga and Košice (Slovakia) — as well as from the cities of Bucharest (Romania) and Ghent (Belgium), together with students from Braga, are developing new proposals for the area surrounding the Este River. The intervention area extends from Parque da Rodovia to the parish of Lomar.

The project has been implemented since 2022 in several European cities and involves nearly one hundred students and teachers, including participants with reduced mobility, deaf participants, and individuals on the autism spectrum. Together, they are challenged to reflect on and debate concrete urban, environmental, political, social, and cultural issues. The project has already generated proposals for urban areas in the cities of Košice, Ghent, and Bucharest.

In Braga since the beginning of the week, the group has taken part in several capacity-building workshops, field visits, and debates, supported by a team of architects who assist them in developing new proposals. By using pilot digital tools that allow them to formulate and express their views, the project also includes a final presentation in which these young participants will publicly defend their proposals.

The final proposals will be presented tomorrow, Thursday, at 4:00 p.m., at gnration. The session is open to the entire school community and to anyone interested in architecture, urban development, and sustainability.

Youth 4 Bauhaus is a project funded by the Erasmus+ programme and is grounded in the New European Bauhaus (NEB) initiative launched by the European Commission.