Institute Housing and Environment
The Institut Wohnen und Umwelt GmbH (IWU) is based in Darmstadt and deals with interdisciplinary basic research in order to critically examine current and future forms of living.
The research results should be made usable for practice in order to achieve a sustainable improvement in people's living conditions. Furthermore, the possibilities of an economical, rational and socially acceptable use of energy and the environment are to be researched.
The corporate form is a GmbH whose shareholders are the state of Hesse with 60% and the city of Darmstadt with 40%.
The institute has around 40 employees from the disciplines of architecture , building research , biology , electrical engineering , geography , law , mechanical engineering , mathematics , physics , urban planning , sociology and economics . The number of scientific publications is around 60 per year. The IWU has a library that contains around 44,000 volumes and around 160 journals and also has a self-publisher for the publication of its project results. An average of around 40 projects from different areas are carried out each year.
history
It was founded in 1971 by the Hessian state government. After a three-year experimental phase (1971–1974), in which topics such as problems of urban development subsidies, determinants of housing supply and the case study of a large housing estate in Darmstadt were dealt with more scientifically and theoretically, the IWU developed a new concept that closely connects scientific research with political and planning practice and also emphasized the need to develop usable and enforceable proposals. The focus of work in the following years was: development of the settlement structure in Hesse, modernization and renovation of housing and urban development, development of housing needs and demand, especially for the socially disadvantaged classes, further development of instruments for citizen participation and improvement of the living environment, especially in the area of transport for example through traffic calming and research on residential psychology .
In 1985 the Hessian state government decided to expand the technical work to include questions of the efficient use of energy in buildings. Since then, in addition to current housing policy and urban planning issues in the energy research area, topics such as the development of low-energy and passive houses in new and existing buildings, new instruments for evaluating the thermal standards of buildings and further training instruments for actors in the construction sector have been investigated.
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ About the IWU at www.iwu.de. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 1, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
