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15 Essential Architecture and Design Reads for 2023

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March 1, 2022

Deep Green Returns for Season 2

The second season of Metropolis’s sustainability-focused podcast kicks off with an episode on the carbon footprint of the metaverse.

By: Metropolis Editors

Metropolis’s Deep Green, a podcast about how the built environment impacts climate change and equity, returns for its second season today. Buildings are some of the biggest things we make as human beings. In these bi-weekly episodes, we explore how through understanding buildings, cities, and all the things that go into them, we can do better for the environment and all life on this planet.

The first episode of Deep Green’s Season 2 explores the carbon footprint of the metaverse. Even if you don’t care about technology, it’s likely you’ve heard something about the metaverse. It’s a sort of three-dimensional, immersive internet that would take lots of technologies that exist already today, like video games, VR, and NFTs, and find a way to connect all of them.

There is no metaverse without the cloud, which lives in buildings—steel and concrete buildings called data centers. If more people join the metaverse, more stuff gets on the cloud, more data centers—you get the picture. There’s got to be a way to start addressing this before the problem gets out of hand.

Can we build an online world that doesn’t destroy the real one? In “The Carbon Footprint of the Metaverse,” reporter Audrey Grey speaks to Drs. Julie Kriegh and Hyun Woo “Chris” Lee, UW College of Built Environments colleagues, who were part of a team imagining a completely different future for data centers.

Listen to Season 2, Episode 1 now. Then join us every other Tuesday for future episodes covering topics like buildings as trees, water bodies as batteries, and a whole lot more.

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