MONCLOA CAMPUS. CAMPUS OF INTERNATIONAL EXCELLENCE
The Moncloa Campus was projected as the Ciudad Universitaria in 1927 on a 460 ha estate in the northwest of Madrid to be an integrated campus, where education, science and culture would harmoniously merge with each other. Nowadays, it is fully integrated into the metropolitan area of the capital city. In 1999, the Community of Madrid declared it a site of public cultural interest on account of its valuable landscape and its architectural and natural heritage and it is a protected area with strict limitations on its growth and building density.
The Campus houses the two universities coordinating the proposal as well as research centres including CSIC, CIEMAT and INIA. With over 10,000 researchers and 10% of the national scientific production the Moncloa Campus is a unique environment, fostering synergies in higher education, research, innovation and social and cultural projection. More than eighty years after it was projected the Moncloa Campus endeavours to take the lead again and meet the challenges of the 21st Century by combining the triangle of knowledge perspective and social responsibility.
The project is structured as a collaborative agreement between the integrating institutions with the following strategic aims: to achieve scientific excellence and internationalization; to guarantee connectivity and integration; to make the Campus a sustainable system that will boost student employment and contribute to innovation and development. The overall goal is to create a plural and participatory campus, fuelled by the transforming power of diversity, exchanges and dialogue; an efficient and transparently-governed university campus, open to all its members and to all its partner institutions, interacting social, economic and cultural fabric of its environment.
The Campus is committed to specialization in five thematic clusters to achieve scientific and teaching excellence: Global Change and New Energies, Materials for the Future, Agri-Food Industry and Health, Innovative Medicine and Heritage. The distinctive strengths of each cluster will converge to create unique configurations marked by their innovative and interdisciplinary character, highly competitive at the European level, and producing significant progress in knowledge transfer.
Connectivity is the key element in the process of integration. The Campus provides the interconnection between researchers and the institutions within each individually coordinated cluster, and facilitates the interdependence of the clusters through a general governing system.
The Campus, its community and the city, all incorporated into the urban fabric of Madrid, will be the main beneficiaries of this challenge. The Moncloa Campus will be sustainable, healthy and socially committed. The project includes specific actions focused on the restoration of its landscape and its architectural and cultural heritage, and on its didactic potential and its use as a leisure facility for the general public. Goals include optimal energy use, sustainable public transport, health improvement and coexistence. It will offer full accessibility for people with disabilities, ensure protection against gender discrimination, support talent, provide equal opportunities and encourage development cooperation.
The Moncloa Campus includes a significant number of diverse institutions and is based on multi-disciplinary transversality ; it aims to attract students and researchers from all over the world, with their own languages and cultures, and one of its main scientific objectives is the protection of the environment. In short, it is firmly committed to the project The Power of Diversity as an innovating and integrating plan to achieve excellence and sustainable development.
