Grant: Canada Research Chairs

The building sector plays a critical role in the transition toward low carbon, resilient, and healthy urban communities, and drivers of current (and future) building performance are becoming ever more complex. Understanding and improving building performance thus increasingly require multidisciplinary perspectives that draw on such domains as engineering, architecture, urban planning, socioeconomics, health, and behavioural science. In practice, however, current research efforts and approaches are often limited in scope and methods, rarely drawing on knowledge from more than a very limited number of disciplines. Academics working on different facets of the built environment are disconnected from each other and from practitioners, which hinders the technological readiness that would see promising academic advancements implemented by the building sector. This Canada Research Chair (CRC) program proposes an integrated multidisciplinary research framework to guide the next generation of sustainable and resilient buildings and communities. Specific objectives include: (i) modelling and capturing the diverse multidisciplinary mechanisms driving building performance, (ii) mapping and testing strategies to improve building performance holistically under uncertainty, (iii) advancing building design and operation practices, and (iv) guiding urban policy efforts. The project will offer unique methodological contributions to the field of building science and engineering by integrating a diverse set of complementary research tools to guide decision-making. Comprising surveys and interviews, building and urban energy models, machine learning algorithms, and optimisation techniques, these tools and methods will be demonstrated and validated through case studies from Canada and beyond. The gained knowledge will inform conclusions about the current performance of the built environment, providing pathways and concrete recommendations for researchers (on tools and methods), practitioners (on solutions and strategies), and policymakers (on guidelines and code updates).