About
SpaceUp addresses the need for improved space use by introducing systemic social innovation through new ways of thinking, doing, and organising space. It applies sufficiency as a transformative principle to reduce the demand for energy, materials, land, and other resources while delivering well-being for all.
By integrating ecological, spatial, economic, and societal dimensions, SpaceUp promotes socially legitimized structural change in the built environment. SpaceUp adopts a unique regional approach: 3 partners, the European Metropolis of Lille (MEL), the Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB), and the North-West Croatia Regional Energy and Climate Agency (REGEA), act as sufficiency orchestrators. They integrate decision-making in spatial planning, housing, mobility, and energy with the ability to mobilise municipalities, data and governance tools. They will guide the implementation of sufficiency policy mixes and selected measures in urban, peri-urban, and rural neighbourhoods which experience economic change. SpaceUp aligns with the New European Bauhaus initiative, intertwining aesthetics, sustainability, and inclusivity. Thus, the project contributes to EU goals, delivering reduced resource consumption, enhanced social cohesion, and responsible space use within planetary boundaries.
The project will test and validate at least two sufficiency measures in six pilot neighbourhoods (urban, peri-urban, and rural contexts) across three European regions. SpaceUp will create a multi-layered mapping tool and robust data frameworks tailored to identify and quantify under-utilised spaces, enabling municipalities and planners to visualise the potential of their region and integrate it more easily in their planning. The project will identify regulatory, societal, and economic barriers to sufficiency measures, translating findings into practical recommendations to overcome them. A scoring system and an LCA model will be developed to evaluate the sufficiency potential of neighbourhoods, and quantify reductions in energy, material, and land use at the neighbourhood level.
Objectives
SpaceUp expected outcomes include:
- Vacant and under-utilised spaces in buildings and other physical spaces in the built environment are easier to map, enabling better informed and effective decision-making in the built environment.
- Sufficiency measures, their non-technical barriers as well as their environmental, economic and social impacts are better understood by the built environment professionals such as real estate actors, urban planners or designers.
- Validated sufficiency measures, integrating circular economy principles, lead to an absolute reduction in demand of the built environment for energy, raw materials, land, water, floor space, and other resources; while extending the lifecycle of spaces, buildings, and infrastructures.
SpaceUp aims to develop, test, and validate comprehensive policy mixes guided by the sufficiency principle to transform under-utilised spaces and optimise resource use in neighbourhoods facing challenges from economic change. This will be achieved by implementing and assessing the policy mixes in diverse rural, peri-urban, and urban settings in Lille Metropole, Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona, and North-West Croatia, focusing on nieghbourhoods that need repurposing. SpaceUp will set the course to turn them into beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive mixed-use places that integrate spaces for living, working, caring, playing and providing services. The outcome of SpaceUp will be to share and mainstream validated methodologies and approaches to achieve such transformative change and we will make this knowledge available to build environment professionals, policy makers, academia and civil society.
The SpaceUp project is designed to address all expected outcomes outlined in the work programme for “sufficiency measures in the built environment.” By focusing on innovative regional approaches to scaling sufficiency, SpaceUp has the following interrelated objectives:
1. Six neighbourhoods will showcase measurable improvements in space use by implementing and evaluating integrated policy mixes, assessing their socio-environmental impacts, and promoting their adoption across regions.
SpaceUp takes a transformative approach to economic change by reimagining and adapting existing structures to enhance quality of life without further land consumption. The project focuses on context-sensitive strategies, such as repurposing vacant land and spaces, reclaiming parking areas, enabling multi-use public buildings, and fostering densification through 15-minute city principles. By validating these measures, SpaceUp highlights the potential of existing structures to drive systemic, sustainable change, while its regional approach accelerates the mainstreaming of successful innovations.
2. Comprehensive recommendations to overcome non-technical barriers are available:
The SpaceUp project aims to identify and validate solutions to overcome non-technical barriers—such as regulatory, economic, and societal challenges—that hinder the adoption and implementation of sufficiency measures in the built environment. By addressing these barriers, the project ensures that sufficiency measures are not only technically feasible but also socially acceptable, just, and scalable across diverse neighbourhood contexts (i.e. urban, peri-urban, and rural). In doing so, SpaceUp seeks to create solutions that contribute to beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive environments, aligning with the vision of vibrant and equitable neighbourhoods.
3. The resource reduction potential of the policy mixes has been quantified to demonstrate the contribution of the sufficiency potential to inform multi-level policy making:
The SpaceUp project aims to assess the impact of sufficiency measures within policy mixes on reducing demand for energy, raw materials, land, water, and floor space within the built environment. By extending the lifecycle of spaces and integrating circular economy principles in policy making, planning and implementation, SpaceUp seeks to demonstrate the potential for an absolute reduction in resource consumption. A scoring system will be developed to evaluate the potential of vacant and under-utilised spaces, using a set of geographical and environmental criteria to calculate a neighbourhood-level indicator, as well as to suggest ways to repurpose these spaces. The impact assessment will draw on the pilot neighbourhoods, insights from the mapping exercise and the testing of the policy measures and scale up the assessment to identify their overall potential.
4. Enable better-informed and more effective land-use decisions through developing and providing tools to flexibly map vacant and under-utilised spaces:
By providing to local authorities, urban planners, and other built environment professionals, with a flexible and multi-layered mapping tool and open platform, SpaceUp will enable better-informed and more effective land-use decisions within the neighbourhoods in the participating regions and beyond the project’s lifetime. The mapping tool will integrate remote sensing data with regional datasets, addressing the lack of homogeneous data and limited technical resources that hinder the identification of under-utilised spaces. It will be tested on neighbourhoods from the participating regional partners to ensure alignment with local needs and thereby its impact will be demonstrated.
5. Built environment professionals, policy makers, academia and civil society are better informed and empowered to implement sufficiency as a social innovation in the built environment through transformative policy mixes.
This will be achieved by participatory and transdisciplinary approaches: the SpaceUp project is guided by the values and working principles of the NEB Compass, with specific aims to engage built environment professionals vis-a-vis regional societies (e.g., municipalities, regulators, industry and business representatives, real estate actors, architects and urban planners, and civil society) to co-create and implement sufficiency measures for inclusive transformation. The learnings from this will be shared through a variety of formats on the supra-regional level (e.g. NEB Junction, and the CCRI – Circular Cities and Regions’ Initiative Community of Practice) to enable dissemination and exploitation of SpaceUp’s insights.
Pilot areas
SpaceUp is collaborating with three regional partners — Lille European Metropolitan area (MEL), Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) and North-West Croatia (REGEA) — to co-design neighbourhood pilot activities within diverse governance models, spatial typologies and socio-political contexts. This allows translating the sufficiency concept into locally-accepted planning measures, meaningful engagement, transfer of knowledge between pilots and validation of sufficiency measures.
The regions were chosen to ensure heterogeneity of context, geographical spread and variation in historic, cultural, motivational and implementation factors, as well as the power to implement and further mainstream sufficiency policy mixes. Each SpaceUp region will validate and test at least two context-relevant sufficiency measures in pilot neighbourhoods from two different municipalities, that will be presented here in the next months.
The allocation between areas is now as follows:
- Urban area: in Croatia (Zagreb, Trešnjevka) and Spain (Barcelona)
- Peri-urban area: France (Lille area, tbc) and Spain (Barcelona)
- Rural area: Croatia (Konjščina) and France (Lille area, tbc)
The framework addresses three primary neighbourhood challenges: urban densification and adaptive reuse, peri-urban growth management through circular mixed-use models, and rural sufficiency strategies for demographic resilience.
The policy mix applies two main strategic measures:
1. Establishing Sufficiency Strategic Networks
The creation of sufficiency strategic networks will convene the relevant stakeholders—public authorities, planners, architects, housing and energy agencies, local organisations, real state actors, and civil society—to collaboratively identify, align, and activate sufficiency measures. These networks will foster a shared understanding of sufficiency principles, enable cross-sectoral cooperation, and support the re-organisation or activation of under-used spaces and resources in a sustainable, circular, and socially inclusive way. This follows the concept of initiating ‘strategic niche’ for change.
2. Unlocking Opportunities for Mainstreaming Sufficiency Measures
Building upon the insights and connections generated by the networks, each regional partner will identify opportunities to translate sufficiency principles into their respective planning and policy frameworks. This includes linking operational sufficiency measures to existing regional or national instruments—such as urban master plans, spatial development strategies, or existing national data frameworks. This approach closes the gap between experimentation and mainstreaming, turning local sufficiency practices into widely applied territorial approaches.
Resources/Material
Reports
The following reports will be added as they become available. Please note they are still subject to the European Commission’s approval.
- D3.1 – Synthesis report with key research questions on barriers and drivers at the household level, Fraunhofer ISI, M6
- D2.3 – Sufficiency Solutions Catalogue, ICLEI Europe, M9
- D6.1 – Neighbourhood Pilots and Sufficiency Measures Summary Report, ICLEI Europe, M12
- D3.3 – Barriers to sufficiency Measures and How to Overcome Them – Brief Guideline, Fraunhofer ISI, M15
- D5.2 – Methodology for mapping scoring system & KPIs, CSTB, M20
- D5.3 – Testing and validation of mapping methodology in the Pilots, CSTB, M24
- D3.5 – Pilot Case Study Insights Compendium, ICLEI Europe, M30
- D3.6 – Economic barriers to sufficiency, IEECP, M30
- D6.2 – Sufficiency Validation Report: METROPOLE, MEL, M30
- D6.3 – Sufficiency Validation Report: AMB, AMB, M30
- D6.4 – Sufficiency Validation Report: REGEA NORTH, REGEA, M30
- D7.1 – Expanded knowledge base, IEECP, M30
- D7.2 – Adoption guidelines for replication, ICLEI Europe, M33
- D8.3 – Policy and Practice briefs, IEECP, M33
- D7.3 – Strategic synthesis and joint recommendations, IEECP, M36
Multimedia – Brochures, infographics and posters
Newsletter
Contacts
Coordination team:
Dr. Elisabeth Dütschke – Coordinator
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI – Head of the Department of Energy Policy and Energy Markets
[email protected]
Mahsa Bagheri – Deputy project coordinator
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI – Energy Policy and Energy Markets, researcher and project manager
[email protected]
Tina Theiss – Project manager
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI – Department Energy Policy and Energy Markets
Phone +49 160 98709783 – [email protected]
Communications / media lead:
Marine Faber Perrio
IEECP – Senior communications lead
[email protected]
Project team
