Who Will Inhabit the Future? ARW to speak at the New European Bauhaus Festival 2026 – Smart Cities: Design, Sustainability and Innovation

The city of the future will not be the one with more trees in its renderings.
It will be the one capable of behaving less like a machine and more like a habitat.

On 9 June 2026, ARW Associates will take part in “Smart Cities: Design, Sustainability and Innovation”, a satellite event of the New European Bauhaus Festival, held at the Belvedere Berlusconi in Palazzo Lombardia, Milan.

The event is conceived as a forum for dialogue between design, sustainability and innovation, with the aim of rethinking contemporary models of urban development: mobility, architecture, territorial regeneration, rural areas, inclusion and collective wellbeing not as separate issues, but as parts of the same question.

Matteo Facchinelli, Founding partner of ARW Associates, will speak in the panel “Who Will Inhabit the Future? The Delicate Balance Between Humans and Nature”, together with Eugenio Morello, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Design at Politecnico di Milano, and Simona Colombo, Coordinator of LifeNatConnect2030 at Legambiente Lombardia. The discussion will be moderated by Fabrizio Fasanella, journalist and author for Will & Chora Media.

The panel addresses an urgent issue: reintegrating biodiversity into urban contexts not as an aesthetic compensation, but as a necessary condition for rethinking the relationship between people, nature and the built environment.

For ARW, this question lies at the very core of architectural practice.

It is not about adding greenery to the city, but about understanding how the city can once again build more intelligent relationships with the ground, water, shade, landscape, the memory of places and the daily life of communities. Nature is not a backdrop to be protected from a distance. It is a material of the project. It is a fragile infrastructure. It is a form of intelligence that architecture has too often forgotten.

From this perspective, regeneration does not simply mean recovering buildings or transforming abandoned areas. It means repairing relationships: between the built environment and nature, between public space and communities, between existing heritage and new ways of living.

The real question, then, is not only what the cities of the future will look like.

The more uncomfortable question is: who will still have the right to inhabit them?