What bats can teach us about urban design

Abstract

highly insulating but expensive windows, optimizing the arrangement of rooftop solar panels or using rooftop vegetation to moderate demand for heating and cooling.A larger web-based version of the project that does not use the game engine allows users to see the effects of city-wide changes -such as how retrofitting 50% of all buildings in Montreal built before 1950 would affect the city's carbon footprint.The first real-world outing of the Future City Playgrounds project was Eicker's entry in Montreal's 2021 Reinventing Cities competition, run by C40, the global network of cities dedicated to addressing climate change. The competition brought together teams of architects, developers, academics and planners to design climate-friendly uses for a specific site in their city. Eicker's team used their game engine to create a redevelopment of an old factory building along Montreal's Lachine Canal, incorporating a heat-pump system that used the canal water to supply heat to the building.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. "It will be exciting to see that get built in the near future."The team is working to add measures of liveability into the tool -that is, how things such as parking management, bicycle access and social spaces can make a building or neighbourhood more appealing. "Of course that is much more subjective, and much more difficult to come up with good indicators," says Eicker. But adding those aspects is essential to ensure that the sustainable cities of the future are equitable and comfortable places to live.Eicker's ultimate goal is to have a tool like Future City Playgrounds available for every development, so people in local planning meetings can get more involved in designing the evolution of their neighbourhoods. "It's more than an academic exercise, and more than a game," she says."If you want to transform the city towards the most sustainable future, it's not just about technology," Eicker says. "You need people involved. You need the participation, acceptance and social inclusion of the people living there."