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Intelligent City is a technology-enabled and product-based company. With a decade-long legacy, we offer one-stop solutions that seamlessly blend design excellence with practical functionality. Our mission is to redefine sustainable urban buildings, setting new benchmarks for quality, cost, and livability for property owners, operators, and tenants alike.
We achieve these benefits by incorporating mass timber, design engineering, Passive House energy performance, automated and robotic manufacturing, and proprietary parametric software. This fusion powers our revolutionary technology platform, primed to reshape urban housing by introducing affordability, durability, and environmental harmony.
Aptly named Platforms for Life (P4L), this initiative embodies our commitment to a progressive future. Rooted in a vertically integrated, collaborative, and design-centric ethos, this paradigm shift is poised to redefine the value proposition in our industry, ushering in a new era of urban living.
Product: We offer building systems and entire buildings as products, based on the understanding that we need to find meaningful urban living and working solutions that embrace affordability and carbon neutrality. Embracing this vision, we meticulously craft and consistently deliver seamlessly integrated solutions that leave no room for compromise.
Platform: We have created infinitely adaptable building systems that follow platform-based principles. By seamlessly blending manufacturing, material innovation, engineering prowess, and architectural finesse, we can swiftly tailor our building components to precisely match the demands of each unique project.
Process: At the core of our business lies a collaborative design-to-manufacturing process powered by revolutionary parametric software and digital fabrication methods that connect design, simulation, and manufacturing. This allows us to design and optimize buildings and building components for maximum efficiency, functionality, and sustainability.
Intelligent City closed a Series A funding round in June 2022 and successfully applied for federal government funding through Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) and NRCAN’s Investments in Forest Industry Transformation (IFIT) programs. These programs allowed us to build our team of specialists in architecture, mass timber construction, prefabrication, manufacturing, and software and to complete our first pilot plant to initiate the manufacturing of large-scale, integrated mass timber floor panels, high performance mass timber exterior building envelope panels, and structural columns — all part of our platform. We are now starting delivery on our first projects, and we have a large pipeline with many interested clients in BC and across Canada.
The 21st century will see the most significant impact on urban development in the history of humanity. Cities across Canada, North America, and many other countries are facing a housing affordability and sustainability crisis that the incumbent construction industry has proven unable to address.
The gradual shift of the human population from rural to urban areas, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 20501, according to the UN. Canada’s population is expected to increase by 10 to 48 million by 20502, and therefore a continued increase in urban housing demand is also expected. In addition, replacing or retrofitting inadequate urban housing for the 4.3B people currently living in cities today will also be required.
With an average floor area per person between 250 sqft³ and 450 sqft⁴, and adding approx. 125,800,000 people to cities globally per year, the need for urban housing will rise to over 1T sqft by 2050⁵. At the same time, construction is the number one global source of GHG emissions⁶ with an estimated 39% share of global emissions. The production of concrete alone accounts for 8% of global emissions⁷. Without a fundamental change in how we design and build, GHG emissions will spiral out of control.
The AECOO industry responsible for tackling this challenge is known to be fragmented, slow, and risk-averse⁸. In a service-based industry, low margins incentivize stakeholders to avoid risks or change their status quo. As a result, there have been almost no AECOO industry productivity gains in the last 75 years⁹ and systemic innovation is lacking.
To achieve a significant environmental benefit in the AECOO industry and improve affordability in urban housing, incremental innovation will not be enough. Considering the recently increased public discourse on urban housing supply and its affordability, sustainability, and qualitative aspects, the building industry cannot continue in the same direction. With the rising cost of materials, shortage of skilled labor, and more stringent code regulations, the problem is only getting more difficult to solve. If the industry continues to build every building as a custom, bespoke, one-off project, using concrete or manually assembled low-rise timber frame construction, we will continue to see escalating costs without productivity increases. Posing additional challenges towards the incumbent industry, such as building codes that enforce greener buildings, would only mean higher cost and incentives to find loopholes.
The solutions we provide will not only benefit urban centers but also customers who are looking for more sustainable and simple planning and construction processes.
With the increase of urban population, more multi-storey buildings will have to be built, old ones will need to be replaced, and a healthy density must be found. We therefore expect that most residential units built for the additionally required urban housing could be delivered with our technology, either through us or emerging competitors. If all new buildings needed between today and 2050 were to be built with traditional concrete construction methods and the lowest energy standards, we estimate that an additional 71Gt of CO2e would be emitted10, which could be avoided.
In North America alone, the multi-family residential construction market is between $150B and $200B annually in the US, and about $50B in Canada11. About 78% of this market refers to multi-storey apartment buildings12.
To solve these challenges, a convergence of design, manufacturing, software, and renewable building materials is necessary. Intelligent City’s Platforms for Life solution will provide an economically viable path to this paradigm shift. When this project is completed, Intelligent City will be able to offer buildings as an adaptable yet scalable product, combining unique customization with a scalable platform using a shared design, construction, and manufacturing methods.
The potential benefits of Intelligent City’s technology have already been recognized by Breakthrough Energy Solutions Canada, the Lafarge Holcim Award, the Solar Impulse Foundation and Foresight Canada’s 50 Most Investable Cleantech Companies. We take the most holistic approach and assess the embodied, operational, and behavioral emissions of a building life cycle, to fully understand its impact and avoid green washing.
We are an urban housing technology company that takes a product and platform-based approach to buildings, called “Platforms for Life” (P4L). Our mission is to build smarter and to empower people to live better.
Platforms for Life converges and transforms four major technological innovations into one simple, fully integrated, yet highly adaptable and scalable solution:
In 2023, we commissioned our first pilot plant with a set of robotic manufacturing cells and completed testing and certification of our building systems. We have begun delivering our first projects, with many more to come in 2024 and 2025 all across Canada.
With the commercialization of our technology, we are now able to offer scalable solution for mid to high-rise (4-18 storey) buildings, that are compliant with the Encapsulated Mass Timber Code in Canada and the International Building Code in the USA.
Together, these technologies will ensure a sustainable and economically viable transition to carbon-neutral and affordable urban housing. They will bring together a previously fragmented industry and change the industry’s paradigm from service-based and bespoke to product-based and scalable.
