Data and the Built Environment: Reconciling Resources and Information for a Sustainable Living

Dear Colleagues,

We are living an unprecedented moment in time. For the first time in human history, about half of the world population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is forecasted to reach about 70% by 2050, when 2 more billion people are expected to be living on this planet compared to current estimates. Countless more buildings and infrastructures will be constructed, which will further drive up the increasing consumption of raw materials and the energy required to extract, process, and move them around the globe. Recent research shows that the mass of all artificially built products, from high-rise buildings to plastic bottles, is now approximately equal to the mass of all living organisms on the planet and could soon be surpassed if the business-as-usual model of endless growth remains unchecked. Such a sustained model of resource consumption is materialising into a range of environmentally negative impacts, from climate change to the pollution of natural land and sea ecosystems, as well as biodiversity losses and mass extinctions.

Alongside this ever-increasing consumption of physical matter, the creation and extraction of information has also skyrocketed in recent times. About 90% of all available data created since human history first began have been generated in the last two years alone. The trend is only set to accelerate with planned deployments of more advanced technologies for data communication (5G) and data capturing in our buildings (IoT), our neighbourhoods and towns (smart cities), and above our heads (remote sensing). 

Some scholars have argued that this explosion in the availability of machine-readable data, combined with tremendous advancements in artificial intelligence, has opened the doors to new forms of business relying on commoditisation of data as the ‘new oil’. Whether the exponential availability of data and machine learning technologies may be leading us towards a path of endless wealth, or a global state of ‘surveillance capitalism’, is beyond anyone’s guess. However, the knowledge potential offered by data-driven methods to the enterprise of scientific enquiry is something that cannot be ignored if we are to avoid an environmental catastrophe while providing all the material needs required for humans to live in a built environment that remains within planetary boundaries.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather contributions from the wider spectrum of academic research related to the built environment, both across scales (from the individual building or component, to entire cites and regions) as well as systems (e.g., occupant’s and user’s behaviour, urban forms, and urban metabolism). The thematic range is left intentionally broad to facilitate and encourage the submission of works that are inherently multidisciplinary in nature, provided that any methodological component of the work relying on data-driven and machine learning methods is made strongly evident.

Dr. Bernardino D’Amico
Dr. Suha Jaradat
Dr. Masoud Sajjadian
Guest Editors

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