A City Divided: Perceived Neighbourhood Safety And Eastside/Westside Bias in The Qualitative Component of the Smart Cities, Healthy Kids Built Environment Study in Saskatoon

2011 ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Maaria Nuutinen ◽  
Eija Kaasinen ◽  
Jaana Hyvärinen ◽  
Airi Mölsä ◽  
Sanni Siltanen

Buildings shape cities as those cities grow from and nurture people living and working within the built environment. Thus, the conceptualization of smart building should be brought closer to the smart city initiatives that particularly target ensuring and enhancing the sustainability and quality of urban life. In this paper, we propose that a smart building should be interlinked with a smart city surrounding it; it should provide good experiences to its various occupants and it should be in an ongoing state of evolving as an ecosystem, wherein different stakeholders can join to co-produce, co-provide and co-consume services. Smart buildings require a versatile set of smart services based on digital solutions, solutions in the built environment and human activities. We conducted a multiphase collaborative study on new service opportunities guided by a Design Thinking approach. The approach brought people, technology, and business perspectives together and resulted in key service opportunities that have the potential to make the buildings smart and provide enjoyable experience to the occupants who support their living and working activities in smart cities. This paper provides the resulting practical implications as well as proposes future avenues for research.


Author(s):  
Cristina Caramelo Gomes

The development and implementation of ICT solutions changed the built environment. Objects from daily human routines and services, while aiming for sustainable and inclusive qualified solutions, challenged the countless possibilities of interaction between individuals, individuals and products, and products and products. Smart cities associate intelligence to environments and products to boost functionalities, uses, and experiences. The design of smart cities, from the spatial relations, objects interactions, and services availability must be user oriented to satisfy users' needs and expectations, while promoting qualified experiences. From real and questionable solutions, due to technical or functional orientation, emerges the need to observe human perception, reaction, and behavior to understand how it is possible to improve the experience. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the need of a different approach to the conceptualization of smart cities, environments, products, and services, emphasizing an emotionally appealing experience.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 6615
Author(s):  
Sam Preston ◽  
Muhammad Usman Mazhar ◽  
Richard Bull

Cities constitute three quarters of global energy consumption and the built environment is responsible for significant use of final energy (62%) and greenhouse gas emissions (55%). Energy has now become a strategic issue for local authorities (LAs) and can offer savings when budget cuts have threatened the provision of core services. Progressive LAs are exploring energy savings and carbon reduction opportunities as part of the sustainable and smart city agenda. This paper explores the role of citizens in smart city development as “buildings don’t use energy: people do”. Citizens have the potential to shape transitions towards smart and sustainable futures. This paper contributes to the growing evidence base of citizen engagement in low carbon smart cities by presenting novel insights and practical lessons on how citizen engagement can help in smart city development through co-creation with a focus on energy in the built environment. A case study of Nottingham in the UK, a leading smart city, is analysed using Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation. Nottingham City Council (NCC) has pledged to keep “citizens at the heart” of its plans. This paper discusses learnings from two EU funded Horizon 2020 projects, REMOURBAN (REgeneration MOdel for accelerating the smart URBAN transformation) and eTEACHER, both of which aimed to empower citizens to reduce energy consumption and co-create smart solutions. Although these two projects are diverse in approaches and contexts, what unites them is a focus on citizen engagement, both face to face and digital. REMOURBAN has seen a “whole house” approach to retrofit in vulnerable communities to improve liveability through energy efficiency. User interaction and co-creation in eTEACHER has provided specifications for technical design of an energy saving App for buildings. eTEACHER findings reflect users’ energy needs, understanding of control interfaces, motivations for change and own creative ideas. Citizens were made co-creators in eTEACHER from the beginning through regular communication. In REMOURBAN, citizens had a role in the procurement and bidding process to influence retrofit project proposals. Findings can help LAs to engage demographically diverse citizens across a variety of buildings and communities for low carbon smart city development.


Author(s):  
Yigitcanlar ◽  
Wilson ◽  
Kamruzzaman

Cities have started to restructure themselves into ‘smart cities’ to address the challenges of the 21st Century—such as climate change, sustainable development, and digital disruption. One of the major obstacles to success for a smart city is to tackle the mobility and accessibility issues via ‘smart mobility’ solutions. At the verge of the age of smart urbanism, autonomous vehicle technology is seen as an opportunity to realize the smart mobility vision of cities. However, this innovative technological advancement is also speculated to bring a major disruption in urban transport, land use, employment, parking, car ownership, infrastructure design, capital investment decisions, sustainability, mobility, and traffic safety. Despite the potential threats, urban planners and managers are not yet prepared to develop autonomous vehicle strategies for cities to deal with these threats. This is mainly due to a lack of knowledge on the social implications of autonomous capabilities and how exactly they will disrupt our cities. This viewpoint provides a snapshot of the current status of vehicle automation, the direction in which the field is moving forward, the potential impacts of systematic adoption of autonomous vehicles, and how urban planners can mitigate the built environment and land use disruption of autonomous vehicles.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reyhaneh Karimi ◽  
Leila Farahzadi ◽  
Samad M.E. Sepasgozar ◽  
Sharifeh Sargolzaei ◽  
Sanee M. Ebrahimzadeh Sepasgozar ◽  
...  

Technology, particularly over the past decades, has affected the cities and their components, such as building sectors. Consequently, smart building that has currently utilized various technologies which is incorporated into buildings is the core of the present chapter. It provides a comprehensive overview on smart cities, smart buildings and smart home to address what systems and technologies have been incorporated so far. The aim is to review the smart concepts in built environment with the main focus on smart cities, smart buildings, and smart homes. State-of-the-art and current practices in smart buildings were also reviewed to enlighten a set of directions for future studies. The Chapter is primarily focuses on 51 articles in smart buildings/homes, as per collected from various datasets. It represents a summary of systems utilized and incorporared into smart buildings and homes over the past decade (2010–2020). Additional to different features of smart buildings and homes, is the discussion around various fields and system performances currently utilized in smart buildings/homes. Limitations and future trends and directions is also discussed. In total, such building/home systems were categorized into 6 groups, including: security systems, healthcare systems, energy management systems, building/home management systems, automation systems, and activity/movement recognition systems. Furthermore, there are a number of surveys which investigated the user’s acceptance and adoption of the new smart systems in homes and buildings, as presented and summarized thereafter in Tables. The present Chapter is a contribution to a better understanding of the functions and performances of such buildings/homes for further implementation and enhancement so that varying demands of smart citizens are fulfilled and eventually contribute to the development of smart cities.


Author(s):  
S. Shaharuddin ◽  
K. N. Abdul Maulud ◽  
S. A. F. Syed Abdul Rahman ◽  
A. I. Che Ani

Abstract. Technology has advanced and progressed tremendously, and the term city is being elevated to a new level where the smart city has been introduced globally. Recent developments in the concept of smart city have led to a renewed interest in Digital Twin. Using precise Building Information Modelling (BIM) consolidated with big data and sensors, several attempts have been made to establish digital twin smart cities. In recent years, several researchers have sought to determine the capability of smart city and digital twin for various taxonomies such as development and urban planning purposes, built environment, manufacturing, environmental, disaster management, and healthcare. Despite being beneficial in many disciplines, especially in manufacturing, built environment, and urban planning, these existing studies have shown a lack of aspect in terms of emergency or disaster-related as opposed to the elements mentioned above. This is because the researcher has not treated emergencies or disasters in much detail. Therefore, an extensive review on smart city, digital twin, BIM and disaster management and technology that revolves around these terms were summarised. In general, 39 articles from prominent multidisciplinary databases were retrieved over the last two decades based on the suggested PRISMA workflow. These final articles were analysed and categorised into four themes based on the research content, gist, and keywords. Based on the review of 39 articles related to smart city, digital twin and BIM, a workflow for the smart city digital twin and the conceptual framework for indoor disaster management was proposed accordingly. The establishment of smart city digital twins solely for an indoor emergency can be beneficial to urbanites, and it could provide numerous benefits for enhanced situation assessment, decision making, coordination, and resource allocation.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 2143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changfeng Jing ◽  
Tiancheng Sun ◽  
Qiang Chen ◽  
Mingyi Du ◽  
Mingshu Wang ◽  
...  

The exact location of objects, such as infrastructure, is crucial to the systematic understanding of the built environment. The emergence and development of the Internet of Things (IoT) have attracted growing attention to the low-cost location scheme, which can respond to a dramatic increasing amount of public infrastructure in smart cities. Various Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)-based locating systems and noise mitigation methods have been developed. However, most of them are impractical for built environments in large areas due to their high cost, computational complexity, and low noise detection capability. In this paper, we proposed a novel noise mitigation solution integrating the low-cost localization scheme with one mobile RFID reader. We designed a filter algorithm to remove the influence of abnormal data. Inspired the sampling concept, a more carefully parameters calibration was carried out for noise data sampling to improve the accuracy and reduce the computational complexity. To achieve robust noise detection results, we employed the powerful noise detection capability of the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method for the localization and noise mitigation in a large area. The proposed scheme has potential applications for location-based services in smart cities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Antonio Florindo ◽  
Inaian Pignatti Teixeira ◽  
Ligia Vizeu Barrozo ◽  
Flávia Mori Sarti ◽  
Regina Mara Fisberg ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Many studies have investigated the association between the built environment and physical activity behavior in urban settings. However, most of the studies conducted in low- and middle-income countries were cross-sectional, which are limited to identify behavioral determinants. We propose a prospective cohort study to verify the relationship between built environment features and leisure-time and transport-related physical activity in adults from Sao Paulo city, Brazil. Methods Prospective multilevel cohort, denominated “ISA-Physical Activity and Environment”. It will build on the Health Survey of Sao Paulo in 2015 (“Inquérito de Saúde de São Paulo (ISA)” in Portuguese). The Health Survey of Sao Paulo, originally designed as a cross-sectional survey, had a multi-stage sample, covering 150 census tracts distributed in five health administrative areas. Data collection was performed by face-to-face interviews until December 2015 and the sample comprised 4043 individuals aged 12 years or more. The ISA-Physical Activity and Environment study will reassess people who are aged 18 years or more in 2020, including telephone and household interviews. The primary outcome will be leisure-time and transport-related physical activity, assessed through the International Physical Activity Questionnaire long version. Exposure variables will be built environment features in the areas participants live and work in the follow-up. Data analysis will include multivariate multilevel linear and logistic models. We will also conduct cost-effectiveness analysis and develop agent-based models to help inform decision-makers. The study will be conducted by an interdisciplinary research team specialized in physical activity epidemiology, nutritional epidemiology, georeferencing applied to health, statistics, agent-based modeling, public health policy, and health economics. Discussion There are few longitudinal studies on the relationship between the built environment and physical activity behavior in low- and middle-income countries. We believe that the ISA-Physical Activity and Environment study will contribute with important results for the progress of the knowledge in this field and for the implementation of policies that promote leisure-time physical activity and active travel in Sao Paulo and similar cities across the world.


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