The University of Toronto’s School of Engineering has announced a new research center that will, together with its industry partners, work to find a viable solution to the growing need for public infrastructure that is in tune with the push for sustainability and concerns over climate change.

The school’s Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment is supported by KPMB Architects, ZGF, Arup, and eight other AEC firms whose future successes lie critically on the findings of a team of researchers that will be led by the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure, Shoshanna Saxe.

According to the University: “The Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment brings together seven researchers from across U of T, as well as a dozen companies in construction and related industries. The goal is to identify strategies that will lower the environmental footprint of new infrastructure across the board by reimagining how they are designed, where they are built and even what materials they are made of.” 

“In Canada, and around the world, we have a huge housing deficit, a huge infrastructure deficit — there’s a big social need to build much more than we have right now,” Sax explained in a press release. “The average person living in a city consumes fewer resources than the average person living in a suburb, because in a city you have more people per kilometre of sewer, road or electrical infrastructure. There are big rewards for well-designed cities.”

Her efforts will be supported by six other professors taken from different faculties around U of T. Together, they will utilize a breadth of expertise that ranges from the legal frameworks of public housing to executing life-cycle analysis on construction projects in order to expedite the applications of their combined research. Sax said one of her goals is to “find a middle ground where everyone can live in dignity.” In the end, the output of their work will become a valuable resource for the Centre’s supporters to commodify in the hopes of enabling a greener global infrastructure. 

“The conversations we have with our partners can inform their design and construction, as well as the conversations they then have with their clients, raising everyone’s level of knowledge and awareness,” she offered finally. “We hope that by giving people — policymakers, designers and builders — the tools they need to address these challenges of building more with less emissions, we can improve outcomes across the built environment and create a more sustainable future for everyone.”