This text is part of the special Research section
UQAM’s new Resilient City Center brings together researchers from multiple disciplines to meet the challenges of 21st century citiese century.
1er Last November, the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) announced the creation of a new Pole on the resilient city, which brings together some forty researchers and which includes three new research chairs in the field of the environment and urban life.
These research chairs, which are in partnership with the City of Montreal and the Borough of Rosemont – La Petite-Patrie, aim in particular to better equip decision-makers through their work. These are the Research Chair on Ecological Transition, the International Chair on Smart City Uses and Practices and the Urban Forest Research Chair. Other chairs and other partners could be added.
“At UQAM, we have many researchers working on the city. But they have not necessarily developed the sense of community which would allow them to converge towards better results than if they remain on their own, explains Claude Codjia, director of the Institute of Environmental Sciences and professor at UQAM. The idea is to create a convergence in terms of research, in order to be able to help all the actors in the urban environment. As researchers, we need to decompartmentalize, to see what our colleagues are doing. With this pole, our biggest objective is to give adequate information to decision-makers so that they can make the right decisions regarding the city, and to protect the environment of this one. “
We are talking here not only of Montreal, but also of any urban agglomeration in Quebec that needs data on the environment, town planning or any other relevant discipline.
As participants in this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary pole, researchers from the pure sciences as well as the social sciences will address questions touching a multitude of issues present in a city in the 21st century.e century: the quality of living environments, mobility, urban forests, heat islands, population retention, access to housing and essential services, socio-economic and ethnocultural transformations, growth management urban, teleworking and its effects on the urban structure, the persistence of changes linked to the pandemic and their impacts on cities and citizens, among others.
The city is so complex that we cannot entrust an urban issue to a single specialist
Among the projects already underway, the Urban Forest Research Chair intends to deepen knowledge about the trees of the metropolis in order to increase their health and longevity. We therefore set up a slaughter register in order to better understand what motivates these withdrawals. We have also installed equipment on several trees in Montreal to measure the sap flow in order to understand how these trees take their water in an urban environment.
Resilient city, smart city
But what is a resilient city, and a smart city?
“A resilient city is a city endowed with the capacity to adapt to events and natural constraints,” replies Claude Codjia. We are grappling with new problems and cities must adapt to face challenges such as the effects of the pandemic, for example. In 2021, these challenges are numerous and enormous. This is why we need a transdisciplinary pole. These problems are interconnected and concern several areas of expertise. The city is so complex that we cannot entrust an urban issue to a single specialist. “
For example, the air quality in a neighborhood affects public health, as do heat islands. These complex issues require collaboration between disciplines. Thus, geographers and other specialists capable of more accurately identifying problem areas are able to provide this information to public health experts so that they can better target their interventions.
“And a smart city is a city in which the coordination of available resources, infrastructures, citizens’ needs and the search for balance is done in such a way as to minimize waste and losses, to protect the existing everything. by promoting regeneration, adds the professor. It presupposes the provision of accurate and up-to-date information to decision-makers and stakeholders in the city, because the quality of the information available to them depends on the quality and correctness of their decision. The notion of intelligence, here, goes beyond that used in reference to phones and technology. “