The Université libre de Bruxelles, or ULB, is a multicultural university founded in 1834. Its “outward-looking position with regard to Europe and the world has resulted in a number of agreements, collaborations and special partnerships being set up with some of the world’s top universities”. The ULB also engages in various forms of research in fields such as European studies, neuroscience, health care, human sciences and more. The researchers at the ULB engage in various projects with the support of local, regional, and international actors.
Key initiatives
BATir is a “multidisciplinary and comprehensive engineering department in Belgium on Build Environment”. BATir consists of five research units: architectural engineering, town planning, civil engineering, geomechanics, and computer mechanics. This department of the ULB conducts projects on topics such as sustainable urbanism. For example, BATir’s project SMARTER is a new collaborative European project which “aims to boost and support green housing finance and construction”. The project, housed at the ULB, involves a total of 17 partners in 12 European and neighboring countries, for two years. The goal of the projects is to increase citizen/inhabitant desire for green loans which provide financial support for energy efficient renovation, and stimulate an awareness of energy savings. See more.
IGEAT is the Institute of Management of the Environmental and Spatial Planning. The IGEAT conducts “interdisciplinary research in the fields of environment, territorial development, and tourism”. The research department participates in various programs and networks such as the “Sustainable Development” and “Society and Future” programs of the SPF Science Policy (BELSPO) and “Prospective Research in Brussels (PRB). The IGEAT has participated in projects that conduct environmental assessments to evaluate policies from a sustainable perspective, as well as studied the “greening” of production and consumption, and the “contribution of households to the climatic changes by their consumption of energy”. As an interdisciplinary institute, the IGEAT places the evaluation of social and environmental inequalities at the center of every project. See more.