Sufficiency measures in the built environment
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See in 5 min if you're eligible for Sufficiency measures in the built environment offering max €16.0M funding💰 Funding Details
Funding Description
Programme & Topic
* Programme: Horizon Europe – New European Bauhaus (NEB) WP 2025
* Call Identifier: HORIZON-NEB-2025-01-REGEN-03
* Title: “Sufficiency measures in the built environment”
* Type of Action: Research and Innovation Action (RIA) – Budget-based Model Grant Agreement (HORIZON-AG)
Budget Envelope & Grant Size
* Indicative EU contribution per project: up to €16 million.
* Reimbursement rate: 100 % of eligible direct costs + 25 % flat-rate for indirect costs.
* Total call budget: (not yet published; expect 1–3 projects to be funded).
What Will Be Funded
* Development and validation of data-driven methods to map vacant & under-used spaces.
* Piloting ≥ 2 sufficiency measures (e.g. space-sharing schemes, adaptive reuse, modular retrofitting, reversible design) in ≥ 3 neighbourhoods (urban, peri-urban & rural) located in ≥ 3 EU Member States/Associated Countries.
* Quantification of absolute reductions in floor area, energy, raw materials, land and water demand.
* Research on non-technical barriers (regulatory, financial, behavioural) and validated mitigation solutions.
* Participatory, transdisciplinary activities integrating SSH, design & arts.
* Communication & exploitation, incl. mandatory 0.2 % of budget to share results with the NEB Hub CSA (HORIZON-MISS-2024-NEB-01-03).
* Open Science, FAIR data management, sex/gender & inclusiveness measures, and climate neutrality of project operations.
Eligibility Snapshot
* Consortium: Minimum 3 independent legal entities from 3 different EU MS/AC, but successful NEB RIAs typically gather 10-20 partners (cities, academia, SMEs, real-estate actors, CSOs, art & design bodies, ICT providers, etc.).
* Geographical pilots: at least one pilot neighbourhood each in urban, peri-urban and rural contexts, all in different MS/AC.
* Legal entities from non-eligible third countries may participate at their own cost unless exceptional funding is justified.
* Timeline: 06 May 2025 opening → single-stage submission by 12 Nov 2025, 17:00 (Brussels) → GA signature Q3 2026 → project duration 36-48 months is typical.
Key Compliance Points
* Integrate NEB core values: sustainability, aesthetics, inclusion (“beautiful, sustainable, together”).
* Demonstrate circularity & sufficiency (absolute, not relative, resource reduction).
* Include AI/BIM/digital twins only insofar as they advance sufficiency objectives.
* Apply ethics by design and relevant EU legislation (GDPR, Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, Construction Products Regulation, etc.).
📊 At a Glance
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🇪🇺 Strategic Advantages
EU-wide Advantages and Opportunities for "Sufficiency measures in the built environment" (HORIZON-NEB-2025-01-REGEN-03)
1. Single Market Access
• Immediate pathway to an integrated market of 450+ million residents and 25 million businesses, enabling the rapid commercialisation of vacancy-mapping tools, circular retrofit services and shared-space business models.
• EU public procurement (approx. €2 trillion/yr) follows common directives, allowing joint cross-border tenders for digital platforms or modular retrofit kits developed by the project.
• Harmonised consumer-protection and data-governance rules (GDPR, Data Act) lower transaction costs for scaling PropTech solutions EU-wide.
2. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange
• Mandatory 3-neighbourhood/3-country pilots turn the consortium into a living network of rural, peri-urban and urban testbeds.
• Leverage existing EU platforms—URBACT, Eurocities, Housing Europe, Rural Pact—to crowd-source best practices and accelerate mutual recognition of sufficiency measures.
• Transnational experimentation mitigates the “one-size-fits-none” risk, generating culturally diverse design patterns that can be adopted from Helsinki to Heraklion.
3. Alignment with EU Policy & Strategic Agendas
• Directly delivers on the European Green Deal, Renovation Wave, Circular Economy Action Plan and the “Whole-Life-Carbon Roadmap”.
• Feeds evidence into the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and Level(s) framework, informing future sufficiency indicators.
• Supports REPowerEU and Fit-for-55 by reducing both operational and embodied energy demand.
• Embodies New European Bauhaus values—"beautiful, sustainable, together"—in concrete neighbourhood transformations.
4. Regulatory Harmonisation Benefits
• Common EU standards (EPBD Digital Building Logbooks, CEN/TC 350 life-cycle norms, Construction Products Regulation) provide a ready-made compliance backbone for project outputs.
• EU State-aid & innovative procurement rules enable joint market-making (e.g., pre-commercial procurement of mapping AI).
• Results can be fast-tracked into EU standardisation via CEN/CENELEC workshops, giving the consortium agenda-setting power.
5. Access to the EU Innovation Ecosystem
• Tap into 3 000+ living labs catalogued by the JRC, the Built4People partnership, EIT Climate-KIC Deep Demonstrations and over 100 NEB lighthouse projects.
• Use European Digital Innovation Hubs for AI/BIM capacity-building and the forthcoming "Built Environment Data Space" for open data exchange.
• Fast-track IP exploitation through the European Innovation Council (EIC) Transition & Accelerator streams.
6. Funding Synergies
• ERDF & Cohesion Policy (€378 bn 2021-27) can co-finance large-scale roll-outs in participating regions.
• Interreg (e.g., NWE, MED, Baltic) supports replication corridors beyond the pilot sites.
• LIFE (Circular Economy) and EIB ELENA offer technical-assistance grants; InvestEU and Green Deal Industrial Plan enable blended finance for scale-up.
• Erasmus+ Alliances and the Pact for Skills provide training funds to upscale the sufficiency workforce.
7. EU-Scale Deployment & Impact Potential
• If the project unlocks reuse of just 5 % of the EU’s under-occupied residential stock (~1.1 billion m²), it could avoid ≈120 Mt CO₂-eq of embodied emissions by 2035 and relieve housing pressure for ~11 million citizens.
• Standardised vacancy-mapping methodology can become a compulsory annex to municipal Sustainable Energy & Climate Action Plans (SECAPs), driving continent-wide adoption.
• Open-source KPIs feed the EU Building Stock Observatory and inform Eurostat datasets, institutionalising the concept of "floor-space sufficiency".
8. Strategic Recommendations for Applicants
• Build a transdisciplinary consortium mixing:
- Municipalities/regions (data owners & regulators)
- PropTech/GIS SMEs (digital mapping & AI)
- Universities & SSH experts (behavioural, equity, cultural heritage)
- Real-estate & social-housing operators (asset access)
- NGOs/community groups (user engagement)
• Include at least one cohesion country and one climate-front-runner to showcase policy transfer within different economic contexts.
• Align data outputs with the EU Open Data Directive and INSPIRE, ensuring interoperability and re-use.
• Allocate a dedicated work package to "EU policy interfacing"—continuous dialogue with DG ENER, DG ENV & standardisation bodies.
• Reserve ≥0.2 % of budget (as required) plus additional comms funds for high-visibility showcases during the annual New European Bauhaus Festival and World Sustainable Built Environment Conference.
Key Takeaway
Operating at EU level transforms isolated vacancy-reuse experiments into a coherent sufficiency market—reinforced by harmonised standards, multi-billion euro structural funds and continent-wide political momentum under the Green Deal—delivering a scale of impact unattainable within a single Member State.
🏷️ Keywords
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