Urban Sustainability in Practice (with University of Waterloo's Faculty of Environment)

SDE 4 The Forum, NUS CDE, 29 April 2025

The CoolNUS-BEAM team welcomed Dr. Peter Crank and students from the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Environment for an engaging knowledge exchange session at SDE 4, NUS College of Design and Engineering. Organized as part of a field course on urban sustainability, the session brought together researchers from both the CoolNUS-BEAM initiative and the NUS Urban Analytics Lab (UAL) to present current work spanning microclimate monitoring, urban heat mitigation, digital twins, and data-driven planning. Dr Marcel Ignatius opened with an overview of how campus-based microclimate research informs broader urban sustainability strategies, followed by presentations from Joie Lim on digital twin interfaces for microclimate data exploration, Xu Ruohan on data-driven air temperature simulation and prediction, and Liang Xiucheng on street view imagery for architectural captioning and data enrichment — part of the ongoing work by Filip Biljecki's UAL team.

The session concluded with a lively Q&A and a short campus tour, offering Waterloo students a first-hand experience of tropical urban conditions and NUS's built environment research ecosystem. The exchange underscored the value of international academic partnerships in tackling shared urban sustainability challenges, particularly in dense, heat-stressed tropical cities. The CoolNUS-BEAM team looks forward to continued dialogue and potential collaboration with the University of Waterloo Faculty of Environment.