Completed in August 2017, the Urban Sciences Building (USB) is a £58M state-of-the-art structure on the £350M Newcastle Helix regeneration site in the heart of Newcastle.   

Trialling new energy systems, novel materials and smart engineering, the USB is a key part of the Newcastle helix vision to create a full-scale demonstrator of urban innovation - a ‘living laboratory’ underpinning research to make urban centres more sustainable for future generations. 

As well as being the location of CESI headquarters, the USB is home to Newcastle University’s world Top 100 School of Computing and its 1,395 staff and students.  

The building hosts a number of exciting research projects and facilities, including:

• Building as a Power Plant, a project led by Dr Sara Walker, CESI Associate Director and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to look into using buildings to provide demand response
• Smart Grid, the UK's largest Smart Grid project to look at how sources of power can be managed at a reasonable cost
• Decision Theatre, enabling advanced data visualisation so that policy makers and other stakeholders can plan and operate cities sustainably
• The Urban Observatory, the largest set of publicly available real time urban data in the UK

Download the Urban Sciences Building brochure here (PDF: 7MB)