What if you could redesign your neighbourhood - add trees, widen sidewalks or brighten a bus stop - and instantly see how those changes affect energy use, emissions and livability?
At the Next-Generation Cities Institute (NGCI), that question is driving TOOLS4CITIES, a growing suite of digital platforms developed at Concordia to tackle urgent sustainability challenges in cities around the world.
From immersive, game-style neighbourhood simulations to browser-based tools used by municipalities and energy planners, TOOLS4CITIES is rooted in a common idea: build a digital twin of the city using public data and make it usable for different stakeholders.
"We're taking the same underlying urban data model and asking how it can serve different audiences," says Christopher Gibbs, senior advisor for the Urban Simulation Platform and Gamification project at NGCI. "Citizens need one type of interface. Urban planners and utilities need another. But they're connected."
A city you can play
One of the most eye-catching tools in the suite is CITYplayer, a gamified neighbourhood simulator that began as a Concordia co-op project roughly three years ago.
Working with student interns, the NGCI team recreated parts of Montreal using open data on buildings, trees and infrastructure. Users can modify building heights, introduce greenery, adjust lighting or rethink transport options. Sustainability indicators - including energy use and emissions - update in real time.
At any moment, users can shift from a bird's-eye planning view to street level and experience the environment as a pedestrian. The simulation is complete with traffic, shadows and ambient sound.
"It feels familiar because it borrows from video game design," Gibbs says. "But the difference is that it's grounded in real data and tied to research questions."
CITYplayer has already supported community and academic collaborations, including projects in Montreal's Chinatown and research on how residents design and perceive green spaces.
Now, the platform is being piloted in partnership with the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM). Over several sessions, 40 members of the public are testing a virtual multimodal transit hub, navigating scenarios as bus riders, cyclists or metro users.
Instead of filling out a conventional survey, participants can manipulate the digital environment itself - increasing lighting at a bus stop, adding greenery or adjusting seating - before rating how those changes affect their sense of safety or comfort. An AI-driven conversational agent probes deeper, asking why they made certain choices.
Behind the scenes, the system records anonymized engagement data, tracking how long users spend in each scenario and what they adjust. Researchers plan to compare the results with traditional surveys to assess whether gamification produces more thoughtful and informed feedback.
A digital twin for decision-makers
While CITYplayer focuses on citizens, CITYlayers is designed for professionals.
CITYlayers is a browser-based interface that visualizes a city-scale digital twin across such domains as buildings, transport, energy, waste and ecosystems.
Users can overlay datasets to identify patterns, then run sustainability simulations at the click of a mouse. A municipality might select a neighbourhood and test the impact of upgrading building insulation to a higher energy code. Within minutes, remote servers return a report estimating changes in energy demand and emissions.
New tools in development include feasibility studies for district heating and cooling networks, vehicle-emissions attribution models, dashboards assessing community energy readiness across Canada and retrofit analysis for large building portfolios.
What's next for TOOLS4CITIES
Looking ahead, both platforms will continue to evolve. CITYplayer's immediate focus is analyzing pilot results and scaling up through web deployment. CITYlayers is adding new services across energy, transport and building performance, shaped by collaboration with municipalities, utilities and industry partners.
"The climate challenge in cities is enormous," Gibbs says. "We need rigorous tools for decision-makers, but we also need meaningful ways to engage the public."
Learn more about the Next-Generation Cities Institute.
