Topics
We organise our actions in six thematic & strategic agendas:
Strategic Agendas:
Bio-economy
Circular Construction
Chemicals/Plastics
Manufacturing Industry
Food Chain
Water Cycles
Seven leverages provide additional support:
Leverage effects:
Lever Policy Instruments
Lever Circular Procurement
Lever Communication
Lever Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Lever Financing
Lever Jobs & Skills
Lever Research
What, why and how?
Why are we pursuing a circular economy?
Future visions 2050
How do we see our circular future?
About our management
Who steers what at Flanders Circular?
Circular Model Environment for Residential Projects (CMRP)
Designing a digital tool for circular real estate
In the residential real estate market, circularity is still not well known. It’s a fast-paced sector with a wide variety of stakeholders who must make many decisions.
With this project, Bureau Bouwtechniek, in collaboration with Nextensa, aimed to investigate how designers, project developers, and clients can be encouraged to make well-founded circular choices during the design phase of residential projects. They developed the CMRP tool, which works in the BIM environment and provides quick insight into the circular opportunities of a construction project.
The tool makes circular building tangible from the start of a construction project through 3D visualizations and can then track all circular objectives throughout the design process. This is done using clear parameters that carry circular information at the building, element, and material levels.
The case study for this project was the Lake Side residential neighborhood on the Tour et Taxis site in Brussels. During the design process, circular criteria were integrated into the tool and visualized in the 3D model environment, significantly increasing its usability and accessibility.
We also explored the possibility of developing a website that makes circular data from the tool accessible to developers and potential buyers. In this way, all stakeholders can be informed about the added value of circular principles in a construction project.
Website
MOST IMPORTANT
RESULTS
- We developed a framework for circular aspects encountered during the design process. This framework helped define the parameters for different modeling software.
- Based on our framework, we developed a tool that works in the Autodesk Revit environment, a building information modeling program. The tool enables easy visualizations of circular criteria.
- Together with ACA Group, we built a prototype website to share circular data from our tool with developers and future buyers.
- By involving many different profiles in the project—such as BIM modelers, architects, energy and sustainability consultants, project developers—we aimed to consider as many perspectives on circular building as possible.
MOST IMPORTANT
LESSONS LEARNED
- The parameters in BIM models from different architects are constructed very differently, making it not easy to perform analyses across models.
- 3D visualizations offer valuable insights, but for laypeople, a clear score indicating how well something performs in terms of circularity would be more effective as a trigger.
- It is very difficult to influence purchasing behavior through information alone about circularity. Demonstrating that a future benefit can also be a benefit for the buyer is not easy.
WHAT DOES
THE FUTURE HOLD?
During the research, it became clear that the visualizations alone are not sufficient to give a layperson an indication of how a design handles circularity. A clear score would work better and also generate interest in what lies behind the score. Such a score requires a real calculation method, which demands further analysis, potentially with the help of AI. However, this would be the subject of a completely different study, where data collection would be the biggest challenge.
Bureau Bouwtechniek is investigating how Revit data can be pushed to Power BI to visually display circular aspects, EPB, and TOTEM. In this way, dynamic visualizations can be easily shared with developers without expensive software. This is a first step toward a platform supporting the further development of CMRP.
The lessons learned from the CMRP project—where they attempted to extract model data from Revit models of various actors without imposing modeling guidelines—have provided Bureau Bouwtechniek with valuable insights for the development of other tools. For instance, in the Lakeside project, models from different architects are combined, and scripts developed based on CMRP experience are used to streamline the data. This helps avoid data loss, which is also essent
