Urban design and resilience: adapting and redesigning cities to cope with climate change

The effects of climate change are more than visible today. Extreme heat and precipitation events are becoming more frequent and intense around the world. The actions to be implemented to lead cities towards resilience must meet certain criteria and be anchored more deeply in the reflections around territorial planning.

Helping cities become climate resilient

Resilience refers to the ability of an ecosystem or a group of individuals to recover from an external disturbance. Today, it is necessary for cities and territories to adopt measures that will lead them to this climate resilience. This is the aim of Lab'Urba, an urban planning laboratory under the co-supervision of the Université Gustave Eiffel and the Université Paris-Est Créteil, as part of the international research project CRUD (Climate Resilient Urban Design).

The objective of this project is to promote the design of sustainable urban systems that could adapt and thrive while satisfying the needs of city inhabitants.

The simulations were carried out in the Excellence Facility Sense City, whose use has enabled the experimentation of prototypes in selected climatic conditions and to meet the project's challenges.

Launched in October 2021 with the organization of a symposium on climate science, the city and data at Gustave Eiffel University, the project was conducted in two phases: the study phase, marked by five stages, and the validation phase.

The city as a field for experimentation

Global warming and various environmental tragedies highlight the need to rethink cities at multiple scales. In order to respond to these major challenges, the Sense City climate chamber offers a much richer and more complex experimental field than the traditional clean room, and allows greater reproducibility and finer control than the urban environment.

The equipment consists of two 400 m2 spaces on which a portion of territory (called Mini-Ville) is equipped with a multitude of sensors allowing :

study the performance of urban equipment and materials
monitor the city of tomorrow by sending adhoc information
study air, water and soil pollution

Located at the heart of the Gustave Eiffel University, on the Marne-la-Vallée campus, this facility is positioned as a realistic demonstrator of urban innovations.

As an R&D platform open to academics, industrialists and local authorities, Sense-City contributes to the positioning of the Gustave Eiffel University as a flagship center for the city of the future.