Smart City Networks

The popular aphorism that ‘nature is good for you’ is explored by reviewing a number of studies measuring the impact of nature, and its deprivation, on subjects. These range from well-being in dementia patients to the development of cognitive and motor skills in preschool children. With sufficient evidence that access to nature is indeed good for you, and providing a pragmatic (if not rigorously scientific) definition of nature, the paper moves on to identify the key design parameters that have impact on our access to nature.

The work proposes a spatial model that consists of zones, links and qualities. Zones can be inside, edge, near or far, these corresponding to the building interior, the building envelope, the immediate surroundings and the distant landscape. Between these zones are links that are either access or sensory. All the above zones and links can be ascribed qualities. Whilst there is too little data at present to propose a quantitative calibration, the model may be useful to a designer for ordering and balancing various conflicting design decisions. Finally, other issues relating to nature are discussed. These include attracting wildlife into the near zone and facilitating gardening and pet-keeping.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies have been emerging rapidly in the past few years and are expected to redefine the way we interact, communicate and work together. It appears that this emergence is in perfect timing with the growth of Internet of things (IoT) devices and can form a killer combination to go beyond the limits of what is possible today in different industries including architecture and the built environment. In this short introduction, we will look at the evolution of smart devices and how they are expected to shape the future of our connected smart cities. We will finish with suggestions for use case scenarios of these technologies applicable to different areas of the building industry.

Asia is developing, and its cities are going to play a major role in this endeavour to match developed counterparts. Asian trade, population, geographic size of its cities and contribution to global development will only increase in the years to come. Rural settlements or underdeveloped villages are fast converting themselves to smaller towns; smaller towns are converting themselves into small cities, and existing small cities are forging ahead into becoming megacities. This demographic transformation in the urban landscape will only increase the use of resources like land, water, clean air, sanitation, power, transport network and safety in order to survive and grow. The quantity and quality of investment that Asian cities make today in these resources will help them service and sustain their burgeoning population in the future. It is therefore imperative that urban planning, use of technology, futuristic vision and control techniques that are incorporated, work in collaboration to achieve success. Present-day megacities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta, Mumbai, Delhi, Karachi, Istanbul, Tehran, Moscow, etc. have their own share of problems; and negotiating their population’s ever-growing demands have turned into a herculean task. These cities can boast of a glorious and historic past, but how they mitigate their current issues, envisage future needs and meticulously plan their future are important. The concept of smart cities is not to be misunderstood as only constructing idealistic new cities from the scratch. While this could be constituted in some developed economies in Asia, having existing megacities and their urban sprawl change their style of operation to suit present and future needs could be a smarter and more beneficial solution. Cities are never built in a single day; they always evolve with time and with the evolving cultural fabric of its residents.

This study analyzes and outlines the fundamental components of a smart city where information and communication technology (ICT) is synchronized with traditional infrastructures by utilizing new technologies. This study developed the criteria of ICT advancement that reformed the functions and management of a city. These criteria defined opportunities that facilitated rapid explicatory interaction among common citizens, governments, businesses, and several agencies. This study found that ICT technologies facilitate essential engagement in the design and planning of a modern city. This study examined the possible conceptual basis for establishing smart cities. This study also established the viable relation between a fictitious futuristic city and a smart city. Several models of smart cities were reviewed, compared, and summarized. This study highlighted the effectiveness of new technologies in addressing urban challenges, such as urban governance and organization, transportation, energy, and revenue collection. The first part of this study presented the definition and general understanding of smart cities, explained the science of smart cities, reviewed the conceptual basis of these cities, and focused on future ideas about effective digital networks to manage a modern city through smart technology.

Rather than network of people, the Internet of Things (IoT) is network that connects things. It is an interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices. It enables things to access data and communicate with one another. Humans will continue to use the Internet, but the future Internet will also be a pipeline for nonhuman devices – machine to machine (M2M) communication. When one connects any type of devices, tons of data will be generated. The promise of IoT is that more automatic and more intelligent services provided by interconnected smart devices will be prevalent with minimal amount of human interaction. Most of the things connected to IoT are actually simple devices that are referred to as smart devices. The devices become smart when joined together with other devices. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because everything is communicating with everything else in an intelligent and automated fashion. Any given device connects to other surrounding and relevant devices to share collected data. This creates what experts call ambient intelligence, which results when multiple devices act in unison to carry out everyday activities and tasks using the information and intelligence embedded into the network.

The scientific literature converges in indicating better life conditions for citizens as the smart city’s main goal. To achieve this goal, cities leverage different technologies and especially ICT to modify urban infrastructures, public and private services and governance activities. However, smart programs often target the use and experimentation of innovative technologies, whilst citizens are considered as the passive addressees of technological programs. To verify whether smart projects really pursue citizens’ well-being, an extensive empirical survey has been conducted. The research investigates 366 European smart city projects and extracts 42 ICT-enabled projects explicitly focusing on citizens. The analysis sheds light on the complex goal of citizens’ well-being improvement in smart cities and on the most promising ICT solutions to impact urban life conditions. A special focus regards the use of IoT in smart projects addressing the citizens’ well-being.

Addressing energy consumption in the building sector in Europe is considered a matter of urgency, taken its contribution to the emissions of air pollutants and greenhouses gases, heat release, and annual material and energy use. In this paper, it is shown that existing, business as usual scenarios for addressing energy consumption in the building sector underestimate such critical parameters as urbanization, local climate change, and energy poverty. Furthermore, it is shown that (a) the building stock cannot be separated from the space between and around the buildings, with the space being influenced and finally shaped by urbanization, and (b) energy poverty sets an upper limit with respect to the capacity of households to comply with local climate change and energy conservation objectives. Finally, the importance of the interlinks between energy consumption on the one hand and urbanization, local climate change, and energy poverty on the other is examined and demonstrated in view of proposing an integrated energy, environmental, and social policy for energy consumption in the building sector.

More than half of the population in the world lives in cities and urban populations are still rapidly expanding. Increasing population growth in cities inevitably brings about the intensification of urban health problems. The multidimensional nature of factors associated with health together with the dynamic, interconnected environment of cities moderates the effects of policies and interventions that are designed to improve population health. With the emergence of the “Internet of Things” and the availability of “Big Data,” policymakers and practitioners are in need of a new set of analytical tools to comprehensively understand the social, behavioral, and environmental factors that shape population health in cities. Systems science, an interdisciplinary field that draws concepts, theories, and evidence from fields such as computer science, engineering, social planning, economics, psychology, and epidemiology, has shown promise in providing practical conceptual and analytical approaches that can be used to solve urban health problems. This chapter describes the level of complexity that characterizes urban health problems and provides an overview of systems science features and methods that have shown great promise to address urban health challenges. We provide two specific examples to showcase systems science thinking: one using a system dynamics model to prioritize interventions that involve multiple social determinants of health in Toronto, Canada, and the other using an agent-based model to evaluate the impact of different food policies on dietary behaviors in NewYork City. These examples suggest that systems science has the potential to foster collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from different disciplines to evaluate interconnected data and address challenging urban health problems.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that combines aspects and technologies from ubiquitous and pervasive computing, wireless sensor networks, Internet communication protocols, sensing technologies, communication technologies and embedded devices. Smart cities are advancing towards a pervasive, integrated and intelligent environment, where IoT is used to seamlessly interconnect, interact, control and provide insights about the various silos of fragmented systems within cities. The huge number of interconnected devices as well as the significant amount of data generated by them provides unprecedented opportunities to solve urban challenges. These technologies are merged together with city systems to form an environment where the real and digital worlds meet and are continuously in a synergetic interaction. This intelligent and pervasive environment forms the basis of the interconnected smart cities. In this paper, we elucidate the concept of smart cities, the key features and the driver technologies of IoT and the physical digital integration within city systems. We present smart cities applications enabled by the IoT and research challenges and open issues to be faced for the IoT realisation in smart cities.

Current methods used in the study of urban systems are based mostly on economic and transportation demands and ignore human spatial cognition processes, like visual perception, while cognition is an active player in the evolution and dynamics of urban space.

This chapter presents a collection of interdisciplinary studies that link visuospatial cognition to urban dynamics. These are located at the intersection of three rapidly developing scientific, technological, and practical fields: spatial cognition (acquisition and utilization of spatial knowledge), complexity science (graph and network theories), and smart cities (urban planning and design-enhancing digital technologies). We use two complementary methods: (1) Spatial graph-based analysis – Urban environment is represented as a chain of navigational decisions in a form of mathematical graphs (or networks). Then several centrality measures from the graph theory are applied to the constructed graphs to evaluate structural position of urban locations. (2) Computational simulation of the visual search: Pedestrian visual search for urban locations is conceptualized as a stochastic process and modeled by random walk simulation. Results of the simulation are used to quantify visual accessibility of diverse urban settings.

Taken together, suggested methods construct a novel cognitive paradigm in the study of urban systems and urban modeling. The results of the studies present effective tools for exploring various scenarios of urban sustainable design, reshaping infrastructure, mobility, and architecture of our cities.

Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the reclassification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among the major reasons for increasing urban population. The essentially fast growth of cities in the last decades urgently calls for a profound insight into the common principles stirring the structure of urban developments all over the world. In the present chapter, we discuss the graph representations of urban spatial structures and suggested a computationally simple technique that can be used in order to spot the relatively isolated locations and neighborhoods, to detect urban sprawl, and to illuminate the hidden community structures in complex urban textures. The approach may be implemented for the detailed expertise of any urban pattern and the associated transport networks that may include many transportation modes.