Designs, Materials and Solutions to Improve Resilience, Preparedness & Responsiveness of the Built Environment for Climate Adaptation (Built4People)

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Increased awareness of the built environment’s protective role for people and climate adaptation in case of disruptive events.
• Mainstreamed resilience as a key feature of the built environment across its life cycle.
• Improved ability of the built environment to support the preparedness and responsiveness to disruptive events at larger scales.
• Improved ability of the built environment to contribute to the overall quality of living and working.
• Strengthened supply chains for materials and solutions for a resilient and climate proof built environment, adapted to local risks.

The proposal should:

• Deliver innovative designs, materials and solutions to improve resilience and climate proofing of the built environment (in particular new and existing buildings) in a cost-effective and reliable manner.
• Ensure the proposed solutions cover a broad spectrum of natural risks and disasters, for instance natural disruptive events such as earthquakes, floods, heat waves, with a particular focus on extreme climatic events.
• Ensure the proposed solutions make use of natural, easy to manage, as well as advanced, evolutive materials and technologies that help combat the effects of global warming (increased cooling demand, heat island effects, etc.) and result in increased durability, resilience and adaptability of buildings and infrastructures, including their foundations.
• Consider social innovation where relevant, notably as new tools, ideas and methods leading to active citizen engagement and resilience, and as drivers of social change, social ownership, and new social practices.
• Develop and deploy digital and interoperable tools for monitoring, detection of, and response to critical situations (e.g. evacuation of people and first responders).
• Rely, where relevant, on self-sensing and adaptable materials, and materials with embedded sensors and actuators.
• Include, as part of the proposed solutions, built environment concepts that are self-sustained for a certain period of time – including off-grid electricity supply, green infrastructure and water purification and / or rain water provision in buildings.
• Where relevant, investigate whether and how the proposed approaches could apply to cultural heritage buildings across different typologies and geographic conditions, also including innovations in business models and ensuring holistic integration of disciplines across the value chain.
• Validate the proposed solutions for a set of locations that is coherent with the risks and disasters considered in the proposal, ensuring a high degree of awareness and involvement of supply chains.
• Demonstrate that the proposed solutions improve the protection of people when experiencing disruptive events and contribute to enhance resilience and climate proofing at a larger scale (e.g. district, city, energy system).
• Demonstrate that the proposed solutions contribute to improving the overall quality of living and working in the buildings (e.g. in terms of accessibility, comfort and well-being).
• Demonstrate cost-effective improvement of the energy performance, reducing the cost of the interventions compared to traditional methods, as well as the energy related operational costs after the renovation.
• Demonstrate that the proposed solutions improve the use of relevant data such as weather forecasts or catastrophe warnings by monitoring and management systems in the built environment (e.g. to launch automatic emergency protocols to warn and protect buildings users).
• Lead at least 3 large-scale demonstration of the solutions in diverse geographical areas, with various local environmental, social, and economic conditions.

Clustering and cooperation with other relevant projects is strongly encouraged; e.g. with the Horizon Europe Partnership on ‘Driving urban transitions’.

This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines and the involvement of SSH experts, institutions as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.

For this topic, projects are encouraged to define and implement ambitious international outreach and cooperation strategies.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on ‘People-centric, Sustainable Built Environment’ (Built4People).

Activities are expected to achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

Socio-economic science and humanities
Co-programmed European Partnerships
Societal Engagement
Social Innovation