B.C. Premier John Horgan paid Delta a visit on Thursday morning to support a project that melds together the worlds of robotics and housing construction.
Using mass timber and their own robotics technology, Intelligent City is working to build urban housing projects within their factory-warehouse along River Road, all while keeping sustainability, affordability and livability in mind.
“We’re seeking to empower people to live better, and that means to create better homes with better livability ... Simply put, we’re enabling the industry to build smarter and more future-proofed,” said co-founder and CEO Oliver Lang.
Called “Platforms for Life”, the building process uses design engineering, automated manufacturing and software algorithms to create an endless amount of carbon-neutral design options that can be customized to specific developments.
“It’s about building housing for people, it’s about climate action, it’s about making sure we can extend our forest industry well into the future. All of those things are keys of British Columbia and they’re happening right here in Delta ... It’s all happening in a disused shipbuilding facility on River Road, and that’s where innovation is happening,” said Horgan in an interview with the Optimist.
Horgan added that projects like these could “100 per cent” be the future of housing in the province.
Both Horgan and Ravi Kahlon, Minister of Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation and Delta North MLA, had a chance to work with the robot alongside Lang after watching it lift and carry a 500-to 600-pound mass timber panel.
“We know that, for many years, harvesting the forest and the economic pieces that came with it did not connect to what people in communities wanted and what Indigenous communities wanted. And so, what we’ve been doing as a government is putting a lot of focus on bringing people to the table and finding a solution to bring some balance back – and we have been making a lot of progress and we’re going to continue to make progress,” said Kahlon.
The company is working to bring housing developments to Vancouver by 2022.
“This is just a start, there’s a lot more for us to do,” said Lang.
Intelligent City is made up of architects, designers and engineers working to create “uniquely sustainable urban living solutions,” reads their website.
For more information on their projects and process, visit: www.intelligent-city.com/.
