Grafting cities: Cultivating our common future

Energy Cities will organize its annual conference in the city of Modena, in the framework of the Bio-architecture week, together with the city of Modena, the Energy and Sustainable Development Agency – AESS and our long-standing partner Climate Alliance! 

Rebuilding Cities is something Europe has done in the past. Modena is an excellent living example of our common cultural heritage and how each century proposed urban development’s patterns adapted to the context. That’s the ambition of the New European Bauhaus to imagine cities beautiful, sustainable, together. It sets the scene for renewed European policies for the future of cities. The New European Bauhaus is “grafting’ the ‘old’ Bauhaus. As we want to future cities to ‘graft’ the petro-cities.

What does “grafting cities” mean?

Grafting cities (verb) /ˈɡrɑːft·tɪŋ ˈsɪ·tis/: Writing a new story for the city’s future; reinventing each city based what already exists; revealing how a place can flourish by building on its assets and adjusting them; transforming our cities street by street, house by house and place by place to boost diversity and resiliency.

The art of Grafting is revealing how a place can become flourishing by building on its assets and ‘twist them’. Grafting a city is also a movement to transform street by street, house by house, place by place and increase diversity and thus resiliency. In “Grafter’s guerrilla” everyone can be an actor to transform our daily environment.

With our conference we want to reveal what transformations are already in action, the grafting process has already started. We want to make it visible to get the strengths to amplify it. A vacant space becoming a collective bakery; a living street replacing cars; a solar farm covering a deeply polluted brownfield; a new supply chain for local products being structured by municipal markets. Most importantly, new cities are emerging, but the changes will only be deeply rooted if they are clearly articulated to an ambitious local transformation strategy (eg: renewed Covenant of Mayors local strategies).

With our conference we also want to reveal the social forces on which we can build to move the society forward. Citizen’s climate assemblies are blooming at local level and are a key instrument to build ambitious consensus involving everyone. The energy crisis has made clear that without strong involvement of the municipalities, ensuring fairness in the transitions will not happen and jeopardise our capacity to reach climate neutrality.

Throughout the conference, we will think together, we will be inspired and we will learn from each other. The menu of activities we are cooking for you is very appetising, and we are looking forward to sharing it with you.

Here a quick taste of what we will do together!

Stay tuned to learn more!