"Every single citizen in the European Union has a profound, interactive relationship with the built environment."

We spend 90% of our time in buildings. Our daily lives benefit from safe, effective, well-designed and maintained buildings and infrastructure, which provide spaces, mobility and essential services that have the potential to significantly enhance the quality of our lives.

The built environment is designed, created, maintained, renovated and upgraded by the construction sector. Investment in this sector’s activities represents 9% of EU 27 GDP, sustains annually around 18M jobs, and the industry supports 3M enterprises across Europe – 95% of these are SMEs.

The built environment is undergoing a rapid and irreversible transformation, which will touch every citizen in unimaginable ways. Already today, we are increasingly living and working in smart buildings and in the short term future, we will get from A to B, using interconnected, intelligent and sustainable transport infrastructure, which will use its symbiotic interaction with us to learn from our behaviour and constantly adapt and improve itself accordingly.

In order to maximise the potential of the future built environment and ensure that it is “built for people” in the complete sense of the expression, the EU, its citizens and the construction sector need a dynamic, future-proof research agenda, with objectives, outputs and outcomes that serve the needs of all stakeholders and citizens.

The agenda also needs to support the Sustainable Development Goals and the Built for People partnership (B4P) objectives. Moreover, this research agenda will both complement and deliver the wider EU policy agenda. Specifically, this will feature a programme that supports digitalisation, the ambitions of the European Green Deal, the health and well-being of citizens and an inclusive society.

The agenda will also support the Sustainable Development Goals and include programmes that will develop solutions for our buildings, such as energy efficiency and decarbonisation, to not only mitigate but also adapt to the climate crisis. In general, the research results should be replicable in the shortest space of time, to the widest range of real-life situations.

2020 saw a new challenge in the Covid-19 crisis, which delivered a seismic shock to the EU economy and the lives of all its citizens. The way we live, work and interact with each other may have profoundly changed forever and the built environment may need to be adapted accordingly. The crisis demonstrated the important role of well-designed healthy homes and workspaces, digital infrastructure and workflows, smart appliances, etc.

Independently from this, studies showed that a people-centric built and healthy environment improves learning and productivity, while it reduces the cost of health insurance and prevents energy poverty at the same time.

Horizon Europe will provide significant support for some of the urgent research that needs to be done to rapidly transform our built environment. The BUILT4PEOPLE partnership will be the body that drives the relevant programmes that are directly linked to the New European Bauhaus, the Fit for 55 and the revision of the Energy Performance Building Directive.

This Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for the built environment sets out the objectives, outputs and outcomes that provide the framework for value for money, relevant, replicable and people-centric research, aligned with the priority EU policy objectives, including of course research policy.

The SRIA will ultimately transform the built environment into what we need for our economic prosperity, environmental protection and sustainable and fairly distributed health and well-being of all citizens in the EU".

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