Building the Future

Concordia University researchers are leaders in helping the world’s urban communities become more sustainable — and more resilient

It takes more than good engineering to make a city thrive. You have to consider the people who make their homes there, too. “You can create the smartest building or city in the world, but if the community is not part of the development, then you may lose a lot of the benefits of these technologies because of poor use,” says Carmela Cucuzzella, professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. She and her Concordia colleagues are taking the lead in research into such nextgeneration cities, part of the university’s commitment to becoming a future-ready institution that pursues technology without losing sight of humanity. Talented and passionate faculty and students from across multiple disciplines are working together on integrating social and natural sciences, engineering, design, and culture across the built environment. Their collaborations are helping give rise to smarter, more sustainable, and more resilient communities and cities. Building Engineering professor Andreas Athienitis, for example, is one of Concordia’s next-gen city researchers. He guided the design of the Varennes Public Library, the first solar net-zero institutional building in Canada — meaning it produces the same amount of energy as it uses, through a building-integrated solar system that covers and is part of the roof. The Varennes community has embraced this new leed Gold-certified building, and the library has seen attendance double since its re-opening in 2014. “It has become a point of reference for the community and an example for other municipalities to follow,” says Athienitis. Concordia students are benefiting, too. Athienitis regularly takes his classes there so they may see and learn from the structure, which produces 302 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide per year and consumes 78 percent less energy than a comparable non-net-zero building. “It’s like a living lab,” he says. Cucuzzella, Athienitis and a group of other key cities researchers at Concordia have now embarked on an exciting new endeavour thanks to the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (cerc) program, which has approved the search for a new Chair in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Cities and Communities. “We already have a very strong group of people working on a diverse set of challenges,” says Cucuzzella. “This new cerc will help us reimagine and reinvent ways in which we dwell and develop in metropolitan areas.” The timing couldn’t be better. By 2030, according to the United Nations, urban areas are projected to house 60 percent of people globally. That means the pressure to address climate change is growing, as these expanding communities will witness an increase in climatic interruptions such as hurricanes and ice storms. How quickly — and cost-effectively — can cities respond to such emergencies? With the help of the new cerc, researchers at Concordia are poised to make further headway in finding solutions to these kinds of challenges, with the ultimate goal of building resiliency into cities. Athienitis and other researchers are now working on a major project in this vein, focusing on infrastructure such as tunnels and bridges. “We are studying how to avoid the use of salt by using a solar system or geothermal energy for de-icing,” he explains. “This is so the infrastructure can last much longer. If you don’t have salt, there isn’t as much deterioration of the roads.” “It’s a time of action,” says Cucuzzella, who recently led a Montreal-wide competition that invited designers to invigorate city bus shelters in critical and meaningful ways. The aim: to encourage citizens to use the bus rather than their cars — even during the hottest days of summer and the lengthy cold snaps of winter. “Projects like these are reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the degradation of our natural resources,” Cucuzzella says. “Climate change is here, and Concordia’s nextgen cities research is helping to ensure we mitigate and address it as much as possible, as soon as possible.”