The Designscapes project successfully dealt with “design enabled innovation in urban environments” starting from the intuition - largely verified now in practical terms - that the City dimension can and should make a difference in transforming innovation activities started as “little local niches" into promising pathways of transition towards a brave new world where solutions to small and/or localized problems also manage to tackle global challenges successfully.

The inspiration to this side event of the NEB festival comes from the invited speech delivered on November 1st, 2021 by Sir David Attenborough at the opening of the Glasgow COP26 Climate Summit, when he said that in order to reduce global warming in the shortest possible time, “we must recapture billions of tons of carbon from the air. We must fix our sights on keeping one and a half degrees within reach. A new industrial revolution, powered by millions of sustainable innovations, is essential, and is indeed already beginning”.  

The challenge is therefore how to create the most favourable conditions for this industrial revolution to fasten its pace, leveraging the City as supporting environment, in alignment with the NEB principles of art, culture and design, and aiming to promote truly European innovations in the domain of climate mitigation and adaptation, cutting across the known diversities, peculiarities and entry barriers of the EU national markets.

•    What can private capital do to support this process?
•    What do we know about the problem and its possible solutions?
•    What new urban services can be established that do not only respond to a truly global challenge, but also overcome one of the major impediments to enterprise growth, the all-too-narrow size of the EU internal market compared with its global competitors (notably USA and China)?