Urbanisation has made cities the focal point for our economies and societies. Knowledge intensive economies with increasing resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have the opportunity to grow into more sustainable and smarter living and working environments through digitalisation. Smart solutions can improve citizens’ quality of life, while increasing innovation and competitiveness of our industry.
At the same time, we need to boost the digitalisation of the construction sector. Innovations like Building Information Modelling offers new possibilities for designers and builders to model the material properties of construction materials, leading to a more efficient construction process.
The AAC industry supports collaborative, integrated smart city planning, the introduction of performance and life-cycle assessments, sustainability assessment, and visualisation of impacts.
In 2050, more than two thirds of the global population will live in cities. While this unprecedented urbanisation will bring many challenges, we believe that Europe can use this as an opportunity to create sustainable and smarter living environments through the integration of transport, energy and ICT systems. For the construction sector, digitalisation will bring important benefits such as time-savings and a significant increase in productivity and accuracy.
1. The Commission’s data strategy needs to increase digital efforts for construction. The strategy highlights several digital innovations that will define buildings in the future: energy efficiency can be significantly improved through smart applications in buildings, data volumes are growing and data gathered for example through smart meters or smart home appliances will change the roles of buildings, particularly in urban networks. Tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) can for instance incorporate environmental data in building planning which is valuable in scope of a building’s entire life cycle.
2. The strategy for sustainable and smart mobility also should recognize the importance of buildings in the context of more connected urban spaces. We need to focus on net-zero energy districts over building units to ensure the complementarity of energy performance measures.
3. The integration of buildings into energy and electric vehicle charging infrastructure will be crucial to energy- and space-efficiency in cities. We should further focus on achieving more cost-optimal solutions by incentivising on-site renewables in net-zero houses over passive housing.
Han den Hartog
Tel.: +49 (0) 3382 70 60 112
info@eaaca.org
