What is the Living Innovation Lab?

 What is the LILa?

The Living Innovation Lab (LILa) is a joint initiative of the faculty of Engineering Technology (ET) and Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at University Twente, the Netherlands. Its goals:
- provide a semi-controlled setting for observation, monitoring, and experimentation
- support training and education for vocational schools, university students, and practitioners
- connect with local communities and industrial partners
Green Infrastructure is just one among over a dozen of research projects taking place. Click here for more information on the other research projects at this site.

Green Infrastructure
In the initial stage, three different types of green roofs are in development, along with three different types of green walls. The green roofs include extensive and intensive green roofs, and blue-green roofs. The green walls consist of free climbing soil bound plants, scaffolding climbing plants, and wall forming modular vegetation. Both green roofs and green walls are compared to a section of building without green infrastructure, to assess performance comparatively. A later stage includes the transformation of parking places to have permeable pavement and underground water storage adjacent to the LILa site. 

Climate Change
Green Infrastructure can help to reduce the imapacts of climate change in two ways. One way is adaptation, to change our environment and increase resilience. An example of this is planting trees that increasee shade in hot summer months. The second way is mitigation, to reduce the levels of green house gases in the atmosphere. An example of this is that trees use CO2 to grow and thereby remove some from the air.
Most importantly, building green infrastructure can only be truly sustainable and thereby not add to greenhouse gases or other excessive consumption by paying attention to the entire life cycle, from production to the end of life, of the materials involved.

What are the research questions?
Two main research questions are answered through LILa - GI. The first concerns the quantified energy and water tradeoffs of GI.
To answer this we aim to quantify the potential climate resilience benefits:
- reduced urban floods and runoff peaks
- reduced heating/cooling
- carbon sequestration
and quantify the potential tradeoffs:
- CO2 emissions during production, maintenance (for irrigation and pumping), and end of life
- required irrigation and stored precipitation
all through continuous monitoring and modeling.

The second research question is how a supposedly sustainable measure as GI can be constructed in a most sustainable way, that is to say, not just be sustainable during its use phase, but also during material selection, construction, and end-of-life. To answer this, both Life Cycle Analysis modeling and intense cooperation with designers and construction companies are implemented.

Visiting

Do you want to visit the LILa - GI site with a small group? Send an email expressing your interest.

Location at University Twente
You can visit the LILa at University Twente. It is located at the road De Achterhorst, between buildings 31 (Windpark) and 32 (BMC) on the campusmap. Public transportation and access routes can be found in this campusmap.

Current impression
The LILa site is still in the development phase. At the moment you can see poles and signs where the various studies are planned to be constructed.