A 3D City Model as User Interface Connected to an Energy Model

Back in 2007 the municipality of Frederikshavn in Northern Jutland in Denmark decided to use only 100% renewable energy for electricity, heat and transport by the year of 2015. Frederikshavn, the largest city in the municipality, was naturally chosen as case city. To be able to verify whether the green energy balance is possible to achieve, it was necessary to create energy scenarios for the whole city and also give the possibility to alter the current energy production and consumption. At the same time the city decided to involve as many people living in the city as possible, making it a project for the citizens of Frederikshavn. One result of this decision was an interactive Web application developed at Aalborg University. The application uses a 3D city model of the city of Frederikshavn as interface and gives the possibility to alter inputs for the energy consumption and energy production of the city using sliders and buttons as part of the interface. While the 3D model gives an immediate visual result, a connection to an underlying numerical energy model developed in earlier years at the University delivers a quite precise calculation on all vital data involved in the overall calculation of renewable energy within a closed energy system. This chapter describes the underlying theories and methods for creating such a system and presents the system, which can be understood as a case story among many.

The Use of Social Media for Urban Planning

User data created in the digital context has increasingly been of interest to analysis and spatial analysis in particular. Large scale computer user management systems such as digital ticketing and social networking are creating vast amount of data. Such data systems can contain information generated by potentially millions of individuals. This kind of data has been termed big data. The analysis of big data can in its spatial but also in a temporal and social nature be of much interest for analysis in the context of cities and urban areas. This chapter discusses this potential along with a selection of sample work and an in-depth case study. Hereby the focus is mainly on the use and employment of insight gained from social media data, especially the Twitter platform, in regards to cities and urban environments. The first part of the chapter discusses a range of examples that make use of big data and the mapping of digital social network data. The second part discusses the way the data is collected and processed. An important section is dedicated to the aspects of ethical considerations. A summary and an outlook are discussed at the end.

Deconstructing Smart Cities

This chapter defines the smart city in terms of the process whereby computers and computation are being embedded into the very fabric of the city itself. In short, the smart city is the automated city where the goal is to improve the efficiency of how the city functions. These new technologies tend to improve the performance of cities in the short term with respect to how cities function over minutes, hours or days rather than over years or decades. After establishing definitions and context, the author then explores questions of big data. One important challenge is to synthesize or integrate different data about the city's functioning and this provides an enormous challenge which presents many obstacles to producing coherent solutions to diverse urban problems. The chapter augments this argument with ideas about how the emergence of widespread computation provides a new interface to the public realm through which citizens might participate in rather fuller and richer ways than hitherto, through interactions in various kinds of decision-making about the future city. The author concludes with some speculations as to how the emerging science of smart cities fits into the wider science of cities.