Creating Sustainable, Climate-Friendly, and Resource-Conserving Future Living Environments
In the future, we want to shape our living environment so it is more sustainable, more climate-friendly, conserves more resources, and is thus viable in the long term. So what could this look like? As an example, construction is considered a big driver of climate change. At the same time, climate change constitutes a major challenge for the built environment. Climate protection and climate adaptation are thus becoming key tasks of the construction industry. This is where the research of the Profile Area Built and Lived Environment (BLE) at RWTH comes in, which examines how the interplay of innovative building, human use, and societal embedding may result in increased environmental sustainability of construction.
BLE has now been officially inaugurated in the presence of Ina Brandes, Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. “At this University of Excellence, outstanding researchers are working on mastering the great challenges of our time! The new Profile Area fits perfectly into the concept of RWTH. Scientists from various disciplines are researching how construction can be made even more sustainable. Many future specialists will be educated here at RWTH and will also benefit from the expertise of the new Profile Area. The state was very happy to further boost the University of Excellence’s profile,” explained the Minister. The state most recently supported BLE as a Growth Area and thus its journey to becoming a Profile Area.
“Besides focusing on the production of the built environment, we also need to look at the way in which it is used and perceived in order to generate socio-technical innovations as a whole. This is the central focus of BLE. This urgently requires multidisciplinary collaborations between architecture and engineering, the humanities and social sciences, economics, and the humanities,” explains Professor Frank Lohrberg, spokesperson for the new Profile Area.
Outstanding individual research is to be brought together in the network and early-career researchers are to be offered a perspective to meet the most pressing challenges of the Built and Lived Environment. This is precisely the aim of the Profile Areas at RWTH. “We want to and can shape future living environments that are more sustainable, climate-friendly, resource-conserving, and, therefore, viable for the long term. With this new Profile Area, we have the opportunity to demonstrate how sustainable developments of the built and lived environment can succeed,” emphasizes Rector of RWTH Professor Ulrich Rüdiger.
Collaborations Among RWTH Disciplines and Faculties
Researchers from different disciplines and faculties at RWTH work together in Profile Areas in order to create a basis for socially relevant innovations from the findings of excellent foundational and applied research. They coordinate their research activities, use state-of-the-art infrastructures, and form large research networks with national and international partners from science and industry. By establishing the BLE, we have now pooled interdisciplinary research on the major social challenges of our time into our nine Profile Areas. The Profile Areas are the University’s key interdisciplinary research areas and are at the heart of RWTH’s research landscape.
“At RWTH, we firmly believe in the power of interdisciplinary collaborations in diverse teams. This is the journey that will lead us to the answers to the major challenges facing society – the Grand Challenges,” explains Professor Matthias Wessling, Vice-Rector for Knowledge Transfer at the University. “This new Profile Area also clearly demonstrates that we are not complacent and are always looking ahead. We are constantly identifying new topics that are of strategic importance to us and that have the potential to become new Profile Areas.”