Funding Awarded for AMBITIONS Project: Accelerating Transitions in the Built Environment through Value Alignment

The Delft Design for Values Institute is proud to announce that the AMBITIONS project has received funding to investigate how we can better align and accelerate energy, circular economy, and health transitions in the built environment.

A Collaborative Approach to Complex Challenges

The built environment sits at the heart of multiple societal transitions, each interwoven, yet representing diverse and sometimes conflicting public values. Local administrators face difficult choices: How do you shape a future-proof living environment when values clash or prove difficult to realise? How do you achieve public values when organisations and individuals are driven by other, often contradictory, values?
The AMBITIONS consortium, led by prof. dr. ir. Ibo van de Poel from TU Delft’s Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, brings together researchers from the TU Delft Design for Values Institute (faculties TPM and IDE), Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, University of Twente, and Avans University of Applied Sciences, alongside numerous public and private partners.

“We want to contribute to an integrated approach to transitions in the built environment, in which public, organisational, and individual values reinforce rather than work against each other,”
explains project leader Prof. Van de Poel.

Three Key Value Tensions

The research focuses on three critical value tensions that influence the pace of transitions:

1. Between governance levels: How do national, regional, and local policy goals and values relate to each other?
2. Between public values: What happens when values from different transitions collide?
3. Between public, organisational, and individual values: How do we handle tensions between societal values and those of organisations and individuals?

By better understanding these tensions, the consortium aims to develop strategies and tools that enable faster and more effective solutions in the built environment—insights that may also prove valuable for transitions in other contexts and domains.

Broad Partnership Network

From TU Delft, prof. dr. ir. Ibo van de Poel and dr. Martijn Wiarda (TPM), together with dr. Marina Bos-de Vos (IDE), are involved in the project. The consortium includes an extensive network of governments, designers, Top Consortia for Knowledge and Innovation (TKIs), and other organisations committed to transitions in the built environment, including ministries, provinces, municipalities, and industry partners.The AMBITIONS project exemplifies the Design for Values approach in action—bringing together diverse stakeholders to address how values can become accelerators rather than obstacles in achieving sustainable transitions.

More information: NWO Announcement: Three projects awarded for research on values in transitions