Universities have a leadership role in advancing knowledge, technology and tools to create a sustainable future. To fulfill this role effectively and with high credibility, they need to include a focus on sustainability also in their own operations and facilities. Campus projects, be they educational or corporate campus developments, present interesting sustainability challenges and opportunities. Firstly, their size is at the borderline between single building projects and small towns, a fruitful scale for innovative energy and transport solutions. And secondly, they are to a certain degree one-purpose neighborhoods focused on education, research, development or distribution of new ideas, products or services.
In other words, they are dedicated to trigger changes. That makes campus projects, where a large student body and/or work force tries to make a difference in academia or the market place while at the same time experiencing a more or less sustainable built environment around them, potentially highly effective catalysts for sustainable development.
Sustainable campus programs pertain to all aspects of campus life. They can include a wide range of issues such as organic food in the cafeteria, gender balance and cultural diversity, and landscape design supporting informal learning outside of the classroom. While the organizers recognize the value of a comprehensive approach that includes topics like those mentioned before, the network described here will focus on sustainability aspects for which specifications and requirements have to be defined already in a conceptual stage for specific buildings or whole ensembles of the built environment. Once requirement specifications are completed, design competitions based on these specifications won, and buildings proposed in these competitions erected it is very difficult and costly to change fundamental aspects of energy use or of transport in campus areas.
For this reason, the organizers propose to take sustainable building design, energy-efficiency, renewable energy applications and environmentally sound mobility concepts as key topics of the Network dialogues. Related to that, technology transfer issues for environment-friendly energy and mobility solutions, and sustainability education and research in architecture, engineering and other disciplines with direct relevance for these topics will be important additional focal points.
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