challenges and opportunities in the building sector to secure a sustainable future

As humankind, we are in the era that we have great struggles with almost any kind of agenda to optimize. When this comprehensive optimization process includes lifetime, efficiency, and accessibility, leads us to have term of “sustainability”. That last sentence seems to be ideal definition of sustainability. However, while we have discussion on “sustainability in the building sector”, lifetime, efficiency, and accessibility may not seem enough to initiate a strong and sudden argument that leads a consensus to secure a sustainable future of the building sector. This is because, the sector mainly depends on profit and short-term interests since we are living in “the Capitalist Era”, which is the main challenge, in my opinion.
In this essay, complexity and difficulties of sustainability process in the building sector will mainly be discussed and giving the argument of “Digital Cities” for the countless opportunities of the process.
Firstly, starting with the complexity and difficulties, it can be seen that in many developed countries the process has already been started, in the lead of governments, which are mainly based on academic institutions in those countries. Academy is working on the process, producing ways to handle with it, sometimes in corporation with companies, however, those studies are still in the local level and do not attract the majority, except the argument of “Save the Future: Sustainable World”, which is mainly an advertisement of today’s European politics and the sector’s way to affect “the customers” for their public relationship. But how we turn this into a real and “Capitalist Process” so that we may gain more improvements in short term, and also profitable scenario? The answer is “Digitalization in the Building Industry”. Fortunately, we have already started with digitalize the construction environment, which is main reason of the vast majority of private sector involve in: “profit”. This is trying to say that we, engineers and academy, can expand the interest in sustainability in building sector to the international level by managing the process with the capitalist, or with another saying, corporational approach so that we could provide more profitable environment for everyone to attract the necessary attention of everyone. The best way to do this is that producing arguments for “profitable opportunities” of the process.
What are the profitable opportunities? For me, the answer of this question is not extremely important since we can produce tons of them. The answer should be how could we combine all profitable opportunities with many sectors by not stacking only in opportunities in “the building sector”: The concept of “Digital Cities”. This is the main opportunity for the many sectors. An example, mobility is one of the most important topics in sustainability in construction industry but “operational logistics”, which is billions of dollars industry, is not our concern. However, it could be a product of our digital city concept. That was a sole example for other sectors. If we discuss on how the digital cities contribute to securing a sustainable future of the building sector, we may have countless opportunities. One could be simultaneous estimation of the traffic in a city with real time data. With this approach, we can optimize the traffic lights with the most efficient way, so that we can reduce our “dirty” footprint and reduce the time consumption on roads. The global outcomes of this “potential module” of our digital city could amaze all of us. Another one, basis of a digital city, we can let the machine estimate the urban planning of a city, while it is growing, so that the best solution for waste logistics, water infrastructure can be estimated, or even the best and most efficient location of wind turbines can be determined after giving the mass input of weather data to our digital cities.

To conclude, as discussed, opportunities are countless. Whereas, the point is integration of the data: “the big data of cities: Digital Cities”, and this concept is the best way to unitize all the sectors to gain more benefits for our agenda: “Sustainable Future of the Building (and all) sectors”.