A Foundation for Sustainable Built Environments: Accelerating Research, Education, and Transfer Projects

Many of the current major challenges – e.g. housing shortage, inadequate infrastructure, CO2 emissions, or waste – are directly related to the built environment, with most of them affecting all three dimensions of sustainability, i.e. technical-ecological as well as functional-social AND economic-legal aspects. Moreover, all have a high and continuing societal relevance. It is therefore truly alarming that research and education have yet to adequately respond to these challenges. Although 'interdisciplinarity', 'sustainability', and 'ESG' have been the buzzwords of recent years, no significant number of study and research programs integrating those aspects for the built environment are being launched, projects announced, or funding allocated! The paper outlines and concretizes a fundamental idea to generate, evaluate and promote solutions for these problems. It proposes the establishment of a non-profit foundation that has two main tasks: 1. fundraising for innovation projects in research, education and transfer in the field of sustainable built environment. 2. acting as a project sponsor and a service provider for the management of such innovation projects. The paper elaborates on the concept and outlines approaches to tackle these two main tasks.