When the Campus Becomes a Living Lab
What does a sustainable university campus actually look like?
It is tempting to answer that question with targets, strategies and indicators. But sometimes the best way to understand a transition is simply to walk through it.
During our recent HOST monthly meeting, we did exactly that. Walking through the VUB campus’ living labs, we moved from the restaurant to a wadi, from a ‘circular’ building to bike sheds and charging stations, and finally into the heart and veins of the campus energy system. Along the way, colleagues shared not only what has already changed, but also what is still being tested, questioned and learned.
What emerged was a picture of the campus as something more than a collection of buildings. It is becoming a living lab for sustainability: a place where research, infrastructure and everyday behaviour meet.
But what is a living lab? Living labs are action-oriented research and development projects in which concrete challenges are addressed in a real-life setting, like our campus. Researchers collaborate with staff, students, policy and companies to develop, test, and scale innovative solutions. This approach creates direct and tangible connections across different parts of the university.
From information to appetite: shifting what we eat
Our first stop was the VUB restaurant with Kato Thibaut, the VUB Sustainability Coordinator, where one of the deceptively simple questions of the transition becomes very tangible: how do you encourage thousands of people to make more sustainable food choices?
Hot meals in the restaurant already carry an ecological impact label, comparing their footprint with that of an average Belgian meal thanks to the work of Lise Vermeersch and the team of Ecotarian. But research at VUB showed something important: information alone does not necessarily change behaviour. Students often choose according to price, familiarity, comfort and what the people around them are eating rather than sustainability or health.
So, the focus is shifting from simply informing people to changing the choice environment itself. Could plant-based dishes have more attractive names? Could their position on the menu or screen make a difference? Whathappens if a particularly appealing vegan dish is placed next to a less sustainable meat option? And perhaps most importantly: can we make plant-based food feel like the comfort food people already know and love?
VUB has committed through the Green Deal Protein Shift to reaching 60% plant-based and 40% animal protein by 2030, while the student council has expressed the ambition to go even further. The restaurant thusbecomes a testing ground for a much broader question: how can a sustainable choice also become the easy, attractive and normal choice?
Letting water find its way again
From the restaurant, Boud Verbeiren took us towards one of the campus wadis. A wadi may at first look like a simple depression in the landscape. Yet it represents a very different philosophy of urban water management. Instead of directing rainwater as quickly as possible into the sewer system, water is given space and time to infiltrate into the soil and recharge groundwater.
That matters even more on the VUB campus, where groundwater lies some 15 to 20 metres below the surface. Several wadis have now been created, including one behind the new Aula designed to cope with very heavy rainfall events and another combining a permanent pond with a periodically dry area, creating different habitats for biodiversity.
What was particularly striking was that these are not finished pieces of infrastructure. They develop. Soil that has been compacted during construction gets time to recover. Roots grow, plant communities change, animalsarrive and unexpected ecological dynamics emerge.
And while the campus itself is not the most flood-prone part of Brussels, keeping rainwater out of the sewers also contributes to reducing pressure downstream. The ambition of the wider blue-green vision is powerful in its simplicity: as much as possible, rainwater in, no rainwater out — combined with rainwater reuse, lower drinking-water consumption and attention to water quality.
The wadis are therefore at once infrastructure, ecosystem and research site. What VUB learns here will be shared with communes such as Ixelles and help inform blue-green interventions elsewhere in the city.
A building that can change its mind
With Waldo Galle, we entered the Circular Retrofit Lab, where sustainability takes on a very material form.
Buildings require huge quantities of energy and resources. Renovation creates waste, virgin materials are finite, and replacing what already exists often comes with an environmental and social cost. The Architecture Engineering team therefore asks a different question: what if we treated buildings and their components as resources that can have several lives?
In the Circular Retrofit Lab and the nearby Willy van de Meeren Living Lab, walls can be dismantled, components can be adapted and materials reused. Some solutions even rediscover ideas developed decades ago. Modular kitchen and bathroom units, demountable walls and adaptable connections show what construction might look like if buildings were designed less as permanent objects and more as systems that can evolve.
The approach has also changed over time. The research question is no longer merely, Can you prove that reuse is environmentally better? Increasingly, practitioners ask: We believe you. Now tell us how to do it.
And that “how” turns out to be where much of the real innovation lies: working with contractors, regulations, public procurement, business models and existing materials. A living lab is valuable not simply because of thebuilding that emerges at the end, but because it creates a place where researchers and practitioners can learn by doing.
At the Green Energy Park, that experimentation is moving further still, including work on concrete without cement and steel and structures designed to be completely demountable.
Rethinking how we arrive — and what arrives with us
A campus with around 4,000 staff and 24,000 students also has a substantial mobility footprint. With Maarten Ipers, our mobility coordinator, our attention shifted to commuting, bicycles, parking, charging infrastructureand even deliveries.
VUB already benefits from its proximity to public transport, and cycling is being encouraged through bike facilities, secure parking, campaigns such as the Academic Bike Challenge and a staff bike-lease programme.
But here too, the interesting part is not a single solution. Installing electric charging infrastructure, for example, immediately raises wider questions. How should charging be priced? Can the infrastructure also serve residents of the surrounding neighbourhood at night? And while electric cars reduce some impacts compared with combustion-engine vehicles, how do they fit within a strategy that ultimately aims to reduce cardependence?
Data is becoming part of that experiment too. Parking entries, exits and duration can help reveal how campus space is actually being used. Meanwhile, another mobility project looks at something most of us barely notice: the stream of delivery vans entering the campus. Could purchasing be bundled? Could suppliers come once a week rather than several times?
It is a reminder that sustainable mobility is not only about how people travel, but about how the whole campus organises movement.
Behind the walls: the energy transition
The final part of the tour, with Maarten Cumps, took us behind the scenes — into the systems that heat and power the campus.
Here, the scale of the transition becomes immediately visible. Old installations from the 1970s have gradually been replaced by much more efficient condensing boilers, and the temperature of the heat network has alreadybeen reduced from around 130°C to 80°C.
A cogeneration unit currently produces a substantial share of VUB’s own electricity and heat by capturing heat that would otherwise be lost from electricity generation. Yet this is not presented as the end point. It remainsgas-based infrastructure, and the next transition will require another redesign.
The longer-term vision is to move towards much lower-temperature heat networks, potentially supplied by large heat pumps, with individual buildings boosting temperatures only where necessary. That sounds straightforward on paper. In reality, it means rethinking networks, buildings, insulation, investments and technologies simultaneously.
Energy savings are also found in less visible places. Heating is increasingly centrally monitored and controlled, while laboratory ventilation — traditionally extremely energy intensive — is being modernised so thatairflow adapts to actual use and heat can be recovered where possible.
The energy transition, we were reminded, is not one spectacular technological leap. It is a sequence of improvements, experiments, investments and difficult choices about the systems already in place.
A campus that learns
By the end of the tour, a common pattern had emerged.
A meal is not just a meal: it becomes an experiment in behaviour change.
A wadi is not just a drainage feature: it becomes an ecosystem and research site.
A renovated building becomes a test bed for a circular economy.
A parking area generates data for mobility research.
And an energy system becomes a pathway towards an entirely different way of heating a campus.
The campus itself has become a place to imagine, test, fail, adapt and demonstrate what a different future might look like.
Perhaps that is one of the most powerful roles a university can play in the sustainability transition.
And because these experiments take place in the spaces where thousands of us eat, work, study, travel and meet every day, the transition is no longer something abstract.
We can walk through it and experience it in our day to day.
At the end of the tour, we went to the 10th floor of Building G to remind us that the sky is the limit!
So, now we ask you: what challenges and ideas are currently present within your lives, work, environment, and which ones deserve to be tested and scaled? Let us know!
