Research summary
The next decade will see a rapid increase in the construction of urban infrastructure in Canada and globally. This will amplify demand for primary resources, accelerating environmental degradation and contributing to climate change. Unfortunately, there are still gaps in our understanding of how to build infrastructure more sustainably.
To address this, Dr. Shoshanna Saxe, Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure, is studying the relationship between the infrastructure we build and the societies we create, with a particular focus on environmental sustainability. She and her research team are developing the world’s first image-based infrastructure material analysis data set. They also plan to develop new machine learning methods to recognize material use from street view and aerial photographs.