Ursula Eicker lets people play around while designing the cities of the future.
Credit: Marc Bourcier/Concordia University
Now, as co-founder of the Next-Generation Cities Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, Eicker has broadened her research from single buildings to whole cities. “From doing materials research on semiconductors for solar cells to now looking at entire cities, it’s quite a way to go,” she says.The digital twins that Eicker’s team builds are powerful modelling tools — but, because they are complex and data-intensive, they are generally used only by experts.
In the game, users can play with a digital version of Montreal: they can shape a single building or cluster of buildings to simulate a neighbourhood retrofit project, click on surfaces or streets to modify them, or design buildings in empty lots to see how changing materials or adding clean-energy systems can affect the neighbourhood’s character, energy use and emissions.
They earned second place, so that project will not be built. But Eicker’s team repurposed their ideas to retrofit another old factory overlooking the canal. That building was given one of the first zero-carbon certificates in Montreal, but still requires carbon offsets because it uses a gas boiler. The team is working with developers to get its canal-water heat-pump system into the building. “We are basically pursuing the same idea of connecting it to the canal water,” she says.
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