Healthy Building Network
The issue of healthy environment is becoming increasingly important. In buildings, materials and functions play a key role in employee health and performance. Healthy buildings have therefore become a soft competitive factor and a calling card for companies. The awareness that healthy buildings, and therefore healthy employees and a low sickness rate, are a competitive advantage was something that the cross-border Healthy Building Network aimed to entrench in the euregio rhein-maas-nord. Healthy building is not just about soft factors, it also offers considerable advantages in terms of innovative building technology and the resource-saving use of materials by a construction industry that focuses on recycling. Buildings with a healthy indoor climate which produce energy and are of material value once no longer in use are no longer a mere utopian idea.
Since the beginning of 2018, the WFMG, together with the neighbouring towns of Krefeld and Venlo, the district of Viersen, an entrepreneurial network from Venlo and the University of Maastricht, had been part of the INTERREG-V-A project “Healthy Building Network”. The city of Mönchengladbach had integrated the project into the mg+/Wachsende Stadt urban development strategy and, like the city of Venlo, planned to make a significant contribution to achieving the project objectives as a municipal contractor.
The aim of the project, which ran until 2021, was to establish a network for the development of a model region for healthy and sustainable construction. Knowledge, promotion, innovative concepts and the development of new materials were the main focal points. The aim was to raise awareness and hone local expertise, create links between companies and provide impetus for research and development in recycling management. Special promotional vouchers were used to support the innovative developments of interregional companies.
