OP News AW23: Professor Jason Pomeroy

Sustainable Design: Digital Technology as an Enabler to City Planning

Professor Jason Pomeroy is an architect, academic, author and TV presenter and regarded as one of the world’s leaders in sustainable design. He is the founder of interdisciplinary sustainable design and research firm, Pomeroy Studio, and sustainable education provider, Pomeroy Academy. He is also a fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and a happy father of two who attend The Perse School Singapore.

As an architect, academic and TV presenter focused on the subject of smart and sustainable cities, I have always been fascinated in the way cities have evolved, how they are represented and understood. The Renaissance established similarities between objects through analogies. For instance, a city to a set of houses and a house to a set of rooms. By the 17th century, relationships were drawn between objects and their hidden meanings of terrestrial life. By the late 18th century, the city was perceived as a utopia born out of social production as well as scientific and philosophical enlightenment.

The technologies brought forth by the First Industrial Revolution to the Fourth Industrial Revolution have since reshaped human experiences at an individual level, and the way cities and urban infrastructure can heighten humans’ productivity.

As cities have become smarter, the advent of new technologies in the past century has influenced city planning and design, particularly in the representation of cities. This has manifested in the hand drawings of the (analogue) city to the programmable software products in the (digital) city. It has further enabled different entities in the cities to behave in intelligent and co-ordinated ways.

Yet, about half a century ago, hand drawings were still widely recognised as the dominant means for planning, designing and representing cities, buildings and their infrastructure. It was a standard practice to work in “plan layers”. Each layer described a different functional element of a site, such as different land uses, infrastructure and open spaces at city, district and neighbourhood scale. Arduous data collection was made on-site and only updated intermittently. Additionally, the drawings were based on abstractions that only those within the built environment professions understood.

Despite the long-standing history of the handdrawn process, computer-aided design (CAD) drafting has been adopted as a replacement for two-dimensional (2D) drawings since the 1980s, and for three-dimensional (3D) isometric drawings over the last two decades. Whilst drawn representations have changed, the nature of information exchange has remained the same. However, the rise of information technology and the advancement of computer software and hardware have propelled the adoption of building information modelling (BIM). As a collaborative tool, BIM has been largely used to support the intelligent interrogation of design, enhance coordination of documentation and improve the communication between professionals involved in the construction and operation process.

We are standing at the intersection of our current urban challenges, including waste management, pollution, congestion, crime and climate change-related cataclysms, to name a few. Adopting technology to solve system-level issues has brought city planning into a new dimension that calls for system-based solutions and strategies. This has manifested in combining 3D modelling with dynamic digital technology to create digital twins (DTs) for cities. A DT refers to a virtual, dynamic and 3D replica that represents the systems and processes of the physical entity, the “physical twin”, in which both are interconnected through realtime data exchange. By integrating other systems of the city, the DT allows for system-based thinking and forms a new concept upon which smart cities and their infrastructure can be designed, built, tested and operated. Assisted with geographic information systems (GIS), activities within cities can be mapped to provide spatial and temporal data to DTs for visualisation, analysis and prescribing city functions.

It has become evident that the application of DTs for urban governance and planning has acquired a central place in recent years as smart interventions and urban big data have grown rapidly in tandem. However, the application of urban scale DTs will only magnify most problems in cities as a matter of data collection, data assembly and data analysis in a data-driven society. While DT technologies have been critically explored in different disciplines, a “productfocused”, state-driven, “top-down” approach has often been widely adopted.

I am an advocate for a new DT paradigm that is designed to go beyond the mirroring of the “physical world” in the digital realm, and able to learn of the practices found within the “social world” to make meaningful adaptations in the built environment that can enhance people’s lives. Ultimately, the new DT paradigm endeavours to go beyond spatial metrics, by integrating social, environmental, technological, cultural as well as economic data sets. This will transform the natural and built environment into one that is smarter, future-proofed and more inclusive.

My most recent book sets out to grasp a theoretical understanding of urban scale DTs. The book aims to do this from a socio-technological perspective that goes beyond product-focused and technology-oriented practices. It is hoped that this will lay the foundation for urban scholars and industry professionals to shift from using DTs as siloed and automated tools, to a more comprehensive, connected DT paradigm. Putting the resultant theoretical understanding of DTs into practice, the book illustrates how such a model could be used in existing and new cities, districts, and neighbourhoods with the hope of increasing operational efficiencies and enhancing citizens’ lives.

The Digital Twin represented as six pillars of data

Artificial intelligence (AI) will no doubt play a significant role in the way in which we shape cities of the future and could be used in DTs as a predictive tool to solve real-time issues. However, this in itself comes with a cautionary tale of ensuring that we do not succumb to the overtly designed (and therefore sterilised) AI-driven city. After all, cities are dynamic, vibrant places that thrive off the spontaneity of its inhabitants and the “unprogrammed” social interactions of happenstance. If the “software” of the digital world can capture the “hardware” of the physical world, then it only seems natural for us to ensure that the “heartware” of the social world is not only reflected in such DTs, but also preserved.

www.pomeroystudio.sg

www.pomeroyacademy.sg

www.jasonpomeroy.sg

Prof Pomeroy's book Hardware, Software, Heartware: Digital Twinning for More Sustainable Built Environments can be bought from Routledge.com.