Milan is one of those cities that seems to have it all: Italian fashion, incredible art, two of
the world’s great football teams and it’s the economic powerhouse of Italy’s industrial north.
The place is also pretty forward thinking when it comes to climate
change and its “green renaissance” is seeing some cutting edge, green projects come to town.
The latest of those projects is this. Say hello to the Milan Innovation District, or
MIND. $3BN is being poured into making this a state-of-the-art place to work and live.
But the most impressive part isn’t the elegant squares and lakeside
paths. It’s MIND’s digital twin, the first of its kind in the country,
which will closely track and help control carbon emissions.
But will it be enough to make this the jewel in the crown of Italy’s Green Capital?
This one million square metre project is currently being built on the former site of Expo 2015,
a world's fair that was dedicated to advances in food production.
Planners are hoping to harness that spirit to turn this place into an “innovation hub”.
Now, that may sound like a corporate buzz-word, but innovation hubs can
actually have a big impact on an economy and produce world-changing breakthroughs.
The formula goes something like this: create a space where companies, researchers and
entrepreneurs can collaborate, form links to a university or industry leader. Then throw in
something like cheap rent or free healthcare and sit back to watch the innovation happen.
Ok, it might not be as easy as that, but it's the formula that’s given us Stockholm’s Unicorn
Factory — launchpad of Spotify, Skype and Candy Crush — and London’s glamorous Silicon Roundabout.
MIND will build on Milan’s status as a leader in medical research, bringing together a new
research hospital and the headquarters for Human Technopole, Italy’s life sciences institute.
There will also be housing and office space for up to 60,000 people. And when they need
a rest from all that innovation, there are restaurants, bars and leisure facilities too.
What we want to do within mind is to have a five minutes district in which you work,
but you also have a lot of services, leisure services, gym restaurants, small supermarkets.
It’s 2022, so environmental sustainability is big on the agenda. Running through MIND’s centre will
be Europe’s longest linear park. This will be the centrepiece of green infrastructure, housing
thousands of native trees as well as pollination strips designed to encourage biodiversity.
The district will be built without any fossil fuels and by 2040 the
whole development will be carbon-neutral.
MIND’s digital twin, a virtual copy of the whole development,
is going to be essential in getting there.
Digital twins look set to revolutionise civic infrastructure in the decades to come.
By 2025 over 500 cities worldwide could be using a digital twin to manage some area of operations.
Diana Olick brings us the story of one start-up using
virtual imagery in the fight against climate change.
The digital grid at MIND works by collecting data on how and when
buildings are used. This data will be used to model an individual building’s usage,
allowing AI to run its heating, ventilation and lighting.
The data on how individual buildings operate is then shared across the whole grid,
letting the digital twin run at a district management level.
This digital grid that we are developing is going to serve not only the technological
and connectivity needs of the players, but will also enable a lot of mobility
data gathering app services that will make life in mind easier.
As MIND citizens go about their innovative business, this technology will silently
ensure buildings operate at maximum efficiency, constantly monitoring energy usage and waste.
It’s these kind of insights which show the
potential for digital twins in the wider fight against climate change.
A whopping 70 percent of global carbon emissions are emitted by
cities, and buildings account for around two-thirds of that.
If we want to stop the world from warming we need to make sure our buildings are as
efficient as possible; digital twins are essential in helping achieve this.
These technological enabling enabling that we can count on, for example,
can make us use a lot of IoT application, Internet of Things application that would monitor,
for example, how many people are in a building and change the consumption of
electricity consumption of heating or air conditioning, depending on how many people
are in at a certain time. At least that’s the theory.
What remains to be seen is how the technology at MIND will work in practice.
In a place designed to create innovation and change, will the digital grid be able to keep
up as building uses change and new buildings are constructed, or will it become less relevant?
Because of the inheritance we have from Expo 2015 and the peculiarities and characteristics
of the players that are moving to mind, this is definitely going to be a district very much
future proof in terms of I.T. and digital infrastructure.
With digital twins set to become the norm in the coming decades,
will MIND be able to integrate into larger digital twins the scale of Milan or the surrounding area?
What happens in the years from now is anybody’s guess, but what is important
is that a place like MIND is willing to try and develop this new generation of
technology - acting a trailblazer and case study for others to follow and learn from.
You can be sure it won't be the last of its kind in Milan.
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