Building the Future: Engineering Living Materials (ELM)

Unveiling Urban Futures: Exploring Resilience with BLOXHUB’s Roundtable Series

Join BLOXHUB’s Roundtable Series to participate in a dynamic and engaging discussion on critical urban challenges. The series will cover three essential topics: Traversing Smart City Data, Optimizing Urban Microclimates, and Engineering Living Materials. Led by the Urban Partnerships team, each roundtable will offer insights from a BLOXHUB expert in the featured topic and allow participants to actively explore challenges, opportunities, and innovative strategies related to the topics.

Building the Future: Engineering Living Materials (ELM)

There is an imminent and significant shortage of essential resources and materials worldwide. This shortage is not isolated to just the construction sector, but it is anticipated to affect a wide range of industries across sectors. In other words, the scarcity of crucial resources and materials is a pressing concern that has the potential to have far-reaching consequences, influencing the functioning and sustainability of various industries globally. This underscores the urgency and importance of forging novel material streams and production methodologies. But in forging new material and production methodologies, what new material worlds can we anticipate?

This roundtable endeavors to dissect the realm of Engineering Living Materials (ELM) – materials composed of living cells with the potential to fundamentally transform material production, rendering it resource-efficient and ecologically sustainable and creating new functionalities, interfaces, relationships, and experiences with our material world.

The roundtable will be introduced by Phil Ayres, Professor at the Institute for Architecture and Technology at the Danish Royal Academy. Through reference to his involvement in the EU-funded EIC ELMs Portfolio, he will provide an overview of ELM developments, covering current perspectives, immediate applications, and medium-term prospects.

After the introduction, we will delve into uncharted territory, discussing the production of an entirely new class of materials, navigating legislation and certification, and grappling with social acceptance and ethical considerations.

The roundtable will be held in BLOXHUB, Bryghuspladsen 8, 3rd floor, meeting room Copenhagen, 473 Copenhagen.

Please sign up for the roundtable here: