About us 

The Institute is an independent charity established to significantly accelerate the delivery of economically, environmentally and socially sustainable cities and communities. We focus on delivering innovative demonstration projects and developing programmes to actively capture and share learning and best practice.

Our projects seek to:

• create market confidence to encourage investment and the take up of innovation
• identify financial, economic and social models which allow transformation at scale
• connect communities with jobs and skills development opportunities and improve quality of life
• inform and support a step change in industry practice.

Our role

The Institute plays a number of roles in supporting and enabling projects. These include:

• acting as an independent facilitator brokering strategic and operational relationships with partners
• leveraging funding
• sharing knowledge and best practice
• managing projects, shaping and guiding them from inception through to delivery.

Our activity

Our activity focuses on the areas which we believe present the greatest challenge – and opportunity – to creating sustainable cities and communities.  These are resource efficient buildings, sustainable infrastructure and resources and transport and logistics, all of which feed into our cross-cutting projects and programmes. These include Total Community Retrofit, which concentrates on integrated, systems approaches to sustainable development, covering a diverse but inter-related range of elements that have an economic, social and environmental impact on the places we live and work. A number of our cross-cutting projects have a specific focus on innovation (technology, approaches and services) and supply chains.