Alicante: The New European Bauhaus Prizes 2026 have gone to 13 projects, and a floodable urban park in this Spanish city won the public vote in the Champions category. The European Commission announced the winners on 16 October 2026 for the sixth edition of the awards, which honour projects that combine sustainability, inclusion and good design.

The New European Bauhaus Prizes cover several tracks. Five Champions represent established projects, and five Rising Stars highlight promising initiatives from younger applicants. A special prize recognises water resilience, and for the first time the awards reached beyond Europe with two international prizes open to Brazil and Japan. The laureates come from several Member States as well as Ukraine, North Macedonia, Japan and Brazil.

Among the Champions, Circular by Nature in France presents an urban oasis where nothing is wasted. Big People in Germany brings local children and children with refugee experience together for a circus carnival. A therapeutic garden at the VDNG in Ukraine offers a public recovery space for defenders and veterans, and the Social Impact Generator Hub in Cyprus turned a container in Nicosia into an inclusive innovation lab. La Marjal Floodable Urban Park in Alicante, which handles heavy rain while serving as a public space, won the public vote.

The Rising Stars include a Belgian scheme that places floating platforms for waterbirds on urban canals, a neighbourhood transformation in Skopje, and a family olive mill in Portugal that has become a living lab. A Barcelona sports ground is turning into a park with urban orchards and 147 social housing units. Formform from Romania, a digital tool that turns architectural ideas into usable design inputs, won the public vote in this category.

The special prize for water resilience went to ECO H2O in Romania, the first nature-based wastewater system in rural Romania, built in the UNESCO heritage village of Viscri. The international prizes went to the Kamikatsu Zero Waste Center in Japan and to a São Paulo project that turns underused spaces into schools and climate refuges with local communities.

Each of the 13 winners receives a monetary prize of up to €20,000, together with a communication package, coaching and mentoring. Separately, 20 small municipalities received the New European Bauhaus Boost, a scheme supported by a European Parliament pilot project, which helps smaller local authorities carry out renovation, circularity and community regeneration work.

The range of winners shows how the New European Bauhaus Prizes have widened. The New European Bauhaus Prizes began as a design contest tied to the Green Deal and now reward social work, nature-based engineering and community care alongside architecture. That breadth appeals to city halls, which often struggle to combine climate adaptation, housing and social inclusion in a single project.

For the winners of the New European Bauhaus Prizes, the practical benefit is visibility. A prize helps small teams approach funders, municipalities and private partners, and it signals that Brussels values local solutions. The Commission has not yet announced when the next call opens, so applicants for the New European Bauhaus Prizes should watch the official platform.