ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Energy Policy
Sec. Energy and Society
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsuep.2025.1613079
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing the Just Transition: Navigating Towards a Sustainable FutureView all 7 articles
Culture and Heritage for a Just Transition to Climate-neutral and Smart Cities. Text Mining supporting New European Bauhaus elements detection
Provisionally accepted
Ezilda Costanzo*
Daniela Alderuccio- Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), Rome, Italy
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Cities are at the forefront in linking their socio-economic development to Culture and Heritage that they are slowly acknowledging as a way to also address Climate Change. Cultural participation can influence a diverse range of social impact areas, such as health and well-being, social cohesion and intercultural dialogue, innovation, education as well as community-driven urban and territorial renewal and development (OECD 2022). The sense of heritage ownership is a complex relation between individual, collective and institutional claims that can leverage action and better governance. With the New European Bauhaus (NEB) initiative launched in 2021, EU pledges Culture's contribution to the European Green Deal and advocates the role of cultural institutions, as they play a vital role in strengthening community engagement. This paper illustrates to which extent Culture (arts, heritage, cultural and creative industries) and NEB principles are mainstreamed into recent and innovative urban energy and climate policies to drive behavioural change and improve networking and multi-stakeholder commitment. We have focused on a sample of the 100 EU Mission Cities. By analysing their roadmaps for climate-neutrality and smartness, the Climate City Contracts (CCCs), we have addressed the following questions:-Do Cities rely on Culture and Heritage for a Just Transition 1 ? -What's the role of Arts, Heritage, Cultural and Creative Industries in their pathways for a just transition?-Do these actions take advantage of digitalisation?Based on the vocabulary categorisation, we have started developing a Text Mining method that may support extending the analysis of "culture for climate action"-related elements to a broader number and types of urban transition policies. We have interpreted the CCC sample providing a high-quality human-annotated corpus. The aim is training a future AI model that could help assessing impacts and identifying other culture and heritage-based experiences so enhancing "Knowledge for Policy" 2 towards the NEB application in cities.
Keywords: Smart Cities (SC), culture, Text mining (TM), New European Bauhaus, climate action
Received: 16 Apr 2025; Accepted: 15 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Costanzo and Alderuccio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ezilda Costanzo, Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), Rome, Italy
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