NEBINVEST: Financing Urban Renovation on the European Scale

Over the past five years, the New European Bauhaus has validated the approach of using place-based transformations to achieve broader goals like sustainability, social cohesion, and cultural value. This approach is now more widely practiced across Europe: many pilot sites demonstrate how spatial transformations create social, cultural, and ecological value and solve multiple issues at once.

The challenge is financing these transformations so they can be applied at scale. Typically, each project is site-specific and responds to a unique set of stakeholders, legal frameworks, urban layouts, and environmental and social conditions. Accordingly, it is difficult to secure investment for such projects, as most of them rely on institutional funding at the EU or local level. They remain small-scale and, even when they are socially and environmentally successful, the financial return is often very limited – while it is difficult to assess the long-term economic benefit.

Scaling place-based projects is a unique challenge: while they have the potential to achieve progress on many of Europe’s most pressing issues, they remain difficult to scale and finance, thus typically staying at the stage of prototypes rather than wider urban planning implementation.

The goal of this Horizon project is to address this gap between successful pilots and scaling. We do this by developing a new financial-social-environmental model to advance place-based initiatives via a unified investment platform that can attract impact capital to multiple pilot sites and lead to long-term, sustainable urban development. The project seeks to validate a promising new possibility for financing urban regeneration: not direct state funding, and not relying on extractive capital (as is typical today), but instead, real estate investment platforms that operate as social enterprises, combining sustainable profit with social and environmental impact.

A core test case of the project is the formation of NEB Urban Investment Platform (NEBINVEST), which bundles regeneration of urban neighbourhoods into a shared, NEB-inspired real estate fund that would be open to investors with the goal of balancing profit with value for local communities, culture, and the environment.

The project focuses on the particular challenges of structuring and testing this approach, and applying it on the European scale. NEBINVEST aims to create new solutions through a deeply interdisciplinary collaboration: by combining urban regeneration, finance, territorial and property development, culture, and inclusive governance. It builds upon the network and methodologies already established in the flagship Interreg project NONA, which attracts investment to degraded urban areas. NEBINVEST applies the lessons learned across NONA’s various pilot sites and streamlines them in a novel investment platform that unites a portfolio of sites, dramatically scaling impact.