Research Center

Research conducted in a place, not a model.

The Sustainable City is occupied, instrumented and running. That lets the Research Center test prototypes and validate solutions against real behaviour, which is the stage most sustainability research never reaches.

What we work on

Five pillars, chosen because they are where the built environment decides its emissions.

Sustainable built environment: Materials, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, community cohesion and urban planning, studied over the life of a building rather than at handover.
Climate action: Affordable and scalable ways to reduce the risk of climate adversity, aimed at the urgency UN SDG 13 describes.
Sustainability leadership: How organisations implement sustainable practice once the strategy document is signed.
Net-zero targets: Neutralising emissions in practice, supporting the UAE's move toward a knowledge-based, low-carbon economy.
Conscious consumerism: Buying, consuming and travel behaviour inside a sustainable community, and how residents become active participants instead of occupants.

A laboratory the size of a city district.

Prototypes get tested against how people really live, data is collected continuously, and complex solutions are validated in a real-life context. Startups in the Bedayat programme use the same environment to prove a concept before they take it to market.

Inside the living lab

Recent work

All publications

All 64 partners and collaborators

The Sustainable City sustainability dashboard

Measured continuously, not sampled annually.

The district reports on its own performance, which is what makes a multi-year study possible without commissioning fresh fieldwork every time a question comes up.

Ask us something difficult.

Joint research, thesis supervision, access to the living lab, or a dataset you want tested against a real district. The research team would rather hear the awkward questions early.

Start a collaboration