The Barcelona Pilot: YouRban Festival
YouRban Festival Revolutionizes Plastic Reprocessing in Barcelona
The Barcelona pilot took the form of a 10-day public festival, running from 23 April to 3 May, which transformed the outdoor space next to Disseny Hub Barcelona into a live lab for circular design and material innovation.
At its centre was the YouRban Mobile Lab — a recycling facility housed on a truck, stationed in the city and open to the public. This mobile plant demonstrated how glass fiber-reinforced polymers (GFRP) — widely used yet often discarded — can be reprocessed into new objects through design, experimentation, and collaboration.
The festival brought together a deliberately diverse community of participants:
- Citizens, invited to share their needs and expectations
- Designers, architects, and students, developing circular design skills through hands-on practice
- Artists, contributing creative solutions through artistic residencies that went beyond mere functionality
- Researchers and experts from Politecnico di Milano, Fab Lab Barcelona, and Materfad, leading training on regenerative design and material innovation
- Urban Factories, joining through a Cascade Funding mechanism to support the artistic residencies
- Industry professionals, engaging with material demanufacturing and reprocessing at scale
Programme Activities
The festival combined hands-on workshops and school demonstrations with expert-led training on GFRP materials, circular design methods, and regenerative approaches. Thematic talks and knowledge-sharing sessions ran throughout the 10 days, alongside an exhibition at Disseny Hub Barcelona (Cube space) presenting results and prototypes from both the Milan and Barcelona pilots.
From Waste to Prototype
Participants followed the full lifecycle of recycled materials — from waste collection to finished prototype. Designers, students, and professionals applied circular design methods using GFRP as a functional, scalable resource, demonstrating that composite waste can be meaningfully reintegrated into production and urban life.
Part of a Broader European Approach
The Barcelona pilot is one of two complementary pilots — alongside Milan — following a Neighbourhood Participatory Approach supported by collaborative digital tools. Both pilots co-create new objects and urban solutions with local communities, building active circular ecosystems across European cities.
The festival confirmed the viability of a mobile, collaborative production model that positions circularity as both a design approach and a production method — scalable across cities and communities throughout Europe.
Explore a detailed artistic programme at yourbanbarcelona.com
