A new building culture

Why?

We are facing a major construction challenge. Many new homes are needed and millions of homes also need to be gas-cut and insulated. Only if we do this as sustainably as possible, we can achieve the climate objectives: CO2 neutral and a circular economy in 2050. Something has to change to achieve this: the built environment still accounts for about 40% of our CO2 emissions and energy consumption. That has to change.

But it's not just about the numbers, we also see broader opportunities. That is why we propose A new building culture: a program to make innovation and acceleration coincide with the sustainability and beautification of the living environment. We make way for a building culture in which construction is in balance with nature. A building culture that also offers future generations a nice place to live in.

According to the Board of Government Advisers, the key to this lies in the use of biobased building materials. These are natural, living materials, such as wood, hemp, flax, cattail, bamboo, straw and seaweed. These materials store CO2 and grow back during the life of a building. These building materials can make a major contribution to:

• making housing more sustainable
• renewal of formal language and typology in architecture
• an enrichment of the landscape
• a sustainable, healthy and inclusive living environment.

We also want to find out whether these materials are better suited for the prefabrication of homes. Then we can build faster.

What do we want to achieve?

We long for a construction culture that is not only about the amount of homes that have to be built or profits, but also about a sustainable, healthy, nature-inclusive living environment, for everyone. Now and in the future.

At various construction sites, we therefore challenge designers and builders to make design plans for a sustainable, inclusive and aesthetic living and working environment and thus set in motion a new construction culture. With competitions and pilots, we show that nature-inclusive building with biobased materials is feasible, affordable and scalable.

Objectives

The programme 'A new construction culture' has the following objectives:

• Innovate. The development and application of new calculation and drawing methods to make biobased business cases (from cultivation to application) feasible, affordable and scalable. 
• Realize and scale up. The realization of a few large-scale biobased projects or a project that (with a few adjustments) can be applied in several places.
• Stimulate design power. Scaling up should not lead to uniformity. We are looking for location-specific, aesthetic and inspiring examples that are feasible and affordable. We stimulate innovation, design power and multidisciplinary collaboration.
• Influence policy. In the process, we discover the blockages in the system and policy world. We want to remove these blockages as much as possible to make a new building culture possible.
• Increase awareness. We actively share the new insights and concepts with a wide audience in order to increase the enthusiasm for biobased and nature-inclusive construction and to stimulate supply and demand.

Promoters

This programme is an initiative of the Board of Government Advisers, supported by the Ministry of National Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Central Government Real Estate Agency and Staatsbosbeheer.