NEB Partner from Skopje & Zagreb: SSH, Living Labs and Community Engagement

ARETE Institute for Sustainable Prosperity is an interdisciplinary research and action-oriented organisation based in Skopje, North Macedonia, and Zagreb, Croatia. We work at the intersection of social research, community organising, participatory methods and sustainable transition, with a particular interest in how communities can actively shape the systems, resources and spaces that structure everyday life.

Our approach combines social and behavioural research with place-based experimentation, Living Labs and community engagement. We are particularly interested in right-to-the-city approaches: not only how urban environments can become greener or more attractive, but who has the capacity to shape them, whose needs are reflected in their transformation, and how residents can participate collectively in deciding how spaces and resources are used.

This builds on our earlier engagement with community organising, urban struggles and common resources in Skopje and Southeast Europe. Through initiatives including the Skopje LeftEast Encounter, our team has worked around questions of neighbourhood organising, public space, environmental resources, social centres, privatisation and alternative forms of solidarity and local organisation.

Our current applied work focuses strongly on sustainable food systems and public food environments. We work with municipalities, schools, public institutions, researchers and local communities through Living Labs, participatory research, behavioural interventions and co-design processes. We see food as one entry point into the wider question of how everyday urban systems can become more sustainable, democratic and responsive to local needs.

For the New European Bauhaus Facility, we are interested in extending this work into the broader transformation of neighbourhoods and urban environments, including:

• reuse and reactivation of vacant, obsolete and underused spaces;
• neighbourhood regeneration and urban commons;
• public space and community-led urban transformation;
• circularity, repair and reuse;
• waste reduction and community-based waste management;
• urban greening and environmental justice;
• local democracy and participatory governance;
• social infrastructure, belonging and community cohesion;
• temporary and experimental uses of urban space;
• residents’ lived experience of neighbourhood change.

We are especially interested in projects that understand urban transformation as both a spatial and social process. Reuse, for example, is not only a technical question of what can be done with an empty building or space, but also a question of who gets to use it, whose needs define its future, what forms of collective life it can support, and how communities can develop lasting ownership and stewardship.

ARETE can contribute through:

• SSH research and integration;
• Living Lab design and implementation;
• community and stakeholder mapping;
• qualitative and quantitative research;
• citizen engagement and community organising;
• participatory and co-design methods;
• behavioural research;
• needs and perceptions assessment;
• social impact and process evaluation;
• analysis of inclusion, participation, belonging and collective ownership;
• communication between communities, municipalities, researchers and other local actors;
• locally grounded policy and practice recommendations.

We can also bring a Southeast European and post-socialist urban perspective to NEB projects. We are interested in neighbourhoods not simply as places where solutions developed elsewhere are transferred, but as places with their own histories, social relations, informal practices and forms of collective resourcefulness from which broader European approaches to sustainable urban transformation can also learn.