About
The PROBONO project envisions to establish a people-focused European construction industry, by working in harmony with the broader community of stakeholders, to deliver scalable, sustainable, and viable energy-positive and zero-carbon Green Building Neighbourhoods (GBN).
Green Building Neighbourhoods (GBN) in PROBONO are Green Buildings integrated at delimited area or district level with green energy and green mobility management and appropriate infrastructure supported by policies, investments and stakeholders’ engagement and behaviours that ensures just transition that maximise the economic and social co-benefits considering a district profile (population size, socio-economic structure, and geographical and climate characteristics). Delivered in the right way, Green Building Neighbourhood infrastructure is a key enabler of inclusive growth, can improve the accessibility of housing and amenities, reduce poverty and inequality, widen access to jobs and education, make communities more resilient to climate change, and promote public health and wellbeing.
The objective of the project is to produce validated solutions for the design, construction, and operation of zero-emission and positive-energy buildings in sustainable green neighbourhoods. PROBONO will provide strong examples of how Green Building Neighbourhoods' technological and social innovations can be applied, with a vision focused on building infrastructure and a renewed focus on people and sustainability, taking full advantage of digitalization and smart technologies for the benefit of society. The adoption of the PROBONO approach and innovations will be proposed through a range of participatory methods that promote stakeholders (including citizens) partaking in co-designing and co-delivering a sustainable GBN.
For achieving this vision and objective, PROBONO will deliver five GBN Transition Acceleration Enablers deployed in six high-impact and people-focused Living Labs (LLs) across six EU states. These GBN Living Labs will include two municipality-driven large-scale demonstrators (Madrid and Dublin) and four living labs representing business/owner promoters of the Green Building Neighbourhoods transition (Porto, Brussels, Aarhus, Prague). The project brings together a European multidisciplinary consortium of 47 partners, construction and consulting entities, public asset service managers, municipalities, technology solution providers and experts, to turn the six European districts (PROBONO´s Living Labs) into Green Building Neighborhoods (GBN), with positive energy balance and zero carbon emissions.
Effects
The PROBONO project has set out a highly ambitious impact strategy and has created the capability to deliver it with the support of leading-edge partners. Based on this impact strategy, the project will provide significant and measurable impacts not only in energy and construction fields, but also health, science and technology fields.
It is planned to achieve ten expected main impacts by the end of the project:
1: Primary energy savings
2: Investments in sustainable energy
3: Demonstration sites that go beyond nearly-zero energy building performance
4: High energy performance
5: Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions towards zero
6: Reduction of the embodied energy in buildings
7: Reduction of air pollutants towards zero
8: Demonstration of high potential for replicability
9: Shortened construction /retrofitting time and cost
10: Improved final indoor environment quality
"Sister projects" of PROBONO
oPEN Lab is an EU-funded project leading the transition to Positive Energy Neighbourhoods (PENs) in Tartu (Estonia), Pamplona (Spain) and Genk (Belgium).
ARV is a H2020 EU-funded project aiming at creating climate positive circular communities in Europe and increasing the building renovation rate in the continent.