Life City: A Climate-Conscious Concept for Smart and Sustainable Built Environment

Residential construction and land use planning are changing in many countries around the world. There is a clear need for comprehensive, energy-efficient, cost-effective and CO₂-neutral concepts meeting the latest energy and climate policy goals. This opens up new opportunities for the industry. Northern Finland has strong expertise in the field of wooden architecture and wood construction industry. By combining the existing high-tech expertise of enterprises, and strengthening the cooperation between SMEs, new value networks with significant international business potential can be created. This paper presents the Life City-concept, a holistic approach for smart and sustainable built environment, which is being created in the ongoing Life City-project. The concept consists of energy-efficient and modern wooden buildings in CO₂-neutral neighborhoods and includes decentralized energy infrastructure with multiple renewable energy sources and smart networks. Life City-concept is a comprehensive export concept that adapts to the local climate conditions, but also considers the social needs of different communities. Other targets of the Life City-project include enhancing the export business knowledge and technical prerequisites of the collaborating SME companies. In cooperation with the companies, the project aims to develop new design, manufacturing and construction methods that enable improving the cost-effectiveness, environmental impact, energy-economy, microclimate and other living comfort issues of wooden buildings in different climate zones, taking also the climate change and resiliency issues into account. Preliminary project results show that the wood construction industry in Finland is not quite ready for exporting holistic concepts such as the Life City-concept, as more product development, knowledge and resources for export are needed. This finding applies especially to SME companies in the industry.