Digital tools for circular buildings and resilient urban ecosystems

Despite countless innovations and efforts in recent years, the construction sector is one of the most energy-intensive and wasteful sectors, still anchored to traditional methods of design, construction and management of building with a low capacity to exploit the enormous potential for innovation offered by the emerging digital technologies. The recent European guidelines on circular design mark a real paradigm shift in building design by introducing the design-for-deconstruction approach with the goals of durability, adaptability, and waste reduction. In this new scenario, digital technologies are strategic tools for circular design. The paper illustrates the potential offered by the integrated tool of Building Information Modelling and Material Passport, BIM-MP, and digital twin for an ever-deeper knowledge of the complexity of the urban ecosystems and for the simulation of its resilience. BIM-MP integrated tool allows the sharing of information between the various actors involved in the building value chain that can enrich and update it with information related to their own specific disciplines and, at the same time, visualize and extract information provided by others. The use of BIM in the field of heritage conservation, H-BIM, and the development of digital platform recording Material Passport, named “matastre”, can promote the diffusion of a transversal ethic between the sustainability of building and heritage conservation and a resource-efficient economy. The digital twin is a powerful tool in the face of rapid climate change and natural and man-made catastrophic events such as the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has affected the whole of Europe with the energy crisis. This knowledge, if properly channelled through a backpropagation approach of new cognitive algorithms, can iteratively improve the design of building, and promote a radical change from the current on-off design toward a continuum design.