Concordia campus as a Living Lab

The urgency of the UN global sustainability challenges to secure a clean, healthy, safe and prosperous world for everyone and the necessity to improve material, water, land and energy efficiency by several factors is clear. The complexity of these challenges calls for transdisciplinary, integral, innovative, systematic and user-centered approaches to enable a global sustainability transformation. The urgency calls for action on all scales: from fundamental science, student projects, field testing to full-scale rollout. Higher education institutions and universities have always kept adapting themselves to the basic needs of societies, in order to improve human living conditions. In fact, the long-term goal of university communities is not only the advancement of science just for science’s sake. Rather, ‘‘advancing science, serving society’’ is the goal. Universities seek to improve all aspects of life, which necessarily entails attention to the principal needs of societies.

Against this background, this panel will discuss ideas on how research fields may be able to use Concordia’s campuses and Montreal as a game changer living lab. Panelists will include Ursula Eicker, Jing Iris Hu, Alice Jarry, Chunyan Lai, Mohamed Ouf, Cassandra Lamontagne, and Carly Ziter.

Through impulse presentations and a following discussion with all participants, this event will present and discuss scientific insights and questions from different perspectives and give an outlook for possible scenarios of how such using the campus as Living Lab can provide valuable, scalable solutions for a city system.