Rapid urbanization with the associated land cover and land use change, as well as resource depletion, contribute to the degradation of ecosystems and biodiversity and have a negative impact on human health and well-being. Societal calls for responses and results pose a significant challenge for research and education in the various fields concerned with the environment. Alongside the current environmental crisis there is a pressing need for developing ‘green solutions’ for the built environment with the help of data-driven methods, workflows and tools.

In view these developments, a shift from narrow disciplinary and domain-specific approaches towards broader interdisciplinary, multi-domain and multi-scalar strategies is required. This includes data-acquisition, data-sharing and data-integration, as well as data-driven modelling to enable the complexity of sustainability problems arising from rapid urbanization to be tackled. While there have been efforts to address the challenges of multi-domain approaches, for instance in the fields of sustainability, the urban and architectural sciences, as well as the interoperability of methods and tools, the actual problem goes deeper, requiring interdisciplinary knowledge exchange to develop adequate shared paradigms, concepts, methods and tools.

Cyber-physical Architecture (CpA) issue 5 addresses these challenges by engaging with experts from a range of disciplines involved in environmental concerns while utilizing data-acquisition, data-sharing and integration, and data-driven modelling in a discourse that identifies modalities for a broader interdisciplinary, multi-domain and multi-scalar approach.