Sidara has launched the third round of its research funding with the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focusing on how best to use digital technologies and big data to reimagine cities.

The investment comes from Sidara’s Urban Seed Fund, established in 2018, in collaboration with the LCAU at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, aimed at advancing the fields of architecture and urban planning.

Drawing on Sidara's expertise in engineering and project management and MIT's research capabilities, Sidara’s ambition is to invest in research that will help to create more sustainable and livable cities, with the opportunity to influence urban development globally.

Investing in a more livable world for all

Since its inception, the Sidara Urban Seed Fund has championed two funding cycles, supporting a total of eight multi-year research initiatives. The previous two rounds of funding have focused respectively on climate change and the reconstruction of Beirut following the explosion in 2020.

The first round of funded projects explored how urban infrastructure can be part of building resilience against climate volatility, with one project focusing on data scarcity in Kibera, Kenya - a low-income area with limited connectivity to both power and the internet.

The second round of funded projects focused on the reconstruction of Beirut—creating affordable housing, overcoming public health risks (including pollution), and creating a sustainable future for the city. One proposed solution was City Scanners - mobile sensing platforms mounted onto vehicles to capture air pollution data in real time.

As part of its third round, Sidara will fund a range of innovative projects led by MIT Principal Investigators:

  • Beyond Prompts, led by Randall Davis, focuses on analogy-enhanced AI tools for urban design.

  • Urban Observatory, led by Fabio Duarte, will explore sound and visual AI for biodiversity detection.

  • Waka Lagos, led by Cong Cong, will evaluate pedestrian access to metro stations in Lagos and is due to commence in January 2025.

  • Thermal Realities by Carlo Ratti will transform streetscape imagery into thermal digital twins.

  • Generative AI for Data-Driven Co-Design of Urban Infrastructures, led by Gioele Zardini and Jinhau Zhou, will focus on AI-assisted urban infrastructure design.

The aim of the new projects is to develop the role of technology in solving urban planning challenges such as environmental issues, energy usage, and citizen preferences and to generate new solutions that surpass human design.

The projects will be anchored at Sidara’s London headquarters at 150 Holborn, selected for its dynamic urban environment that will provide an ideal space to test new solutions while offering access to European markets and an international talent pool.

Daniel Horner, Director of Planning & Urban Design at Dar, said:

“Today, we live in one of the most transformational times in human history. As architects and planners, it's critical that we shape change and are not being shaped by it. We must be proactive in finding ways to gaze into the world of tomorrow to plan and engineer a more sustainable urban future.

“This latest round of funding builds on research to define new tools that enable a more informed, data-driven design process and form a lens to better understand what the future holds for the built environment.”

Find out more about the Sidara-MIT partnership, click here