City of the Future: Urban Monitoring based on Smart Sensors and Open

Technologies

Robert Schima

1,2

, Mathias Paschen

, Peter Dietrich

2,3

, Jan Bumberger

and Tobias Goblirsch

2,4

Chair of Ocean Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Marine Technology,

University of Rostock, Albert-Einstein-Straße 2, Rostock, Germany

Department Monitoring and Exploration Technologies, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ,

Leipzig, Germany

Chair of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics, Center for Applied Geoscience,

Eberhard-Karls-University of T

ubingen, T

ubigen, Germany

Chair of Information Management, Information Systems Institute, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

Keywords:

Citizen Science, Urban Monitoring, Mobile Sensing, Smart City.

Abstract:

Developments in the ﬁeld of microelectronics and the increasing willingness to use open technologies offer a

variety of opportunities to signiﬁcantly increase both understanding and public participation in the sustainable

design of our cities and living spaces. Urban environmental monitoring on the basis of smart sensors and open

technologies with the participation of citizens and local actors not only allows a better understanding of urban

transformation processes but also increases the acceptance and resilience of a sustainable urban development

towards the city of the future. What will the cities of the future look like? What is certain is that the future

of cities will become more digital, with sensors, apps and citizens networking. So, how can smart sensors

and open technologies help us better understand our environment? What do we need to know about our

environment and the city we live in? Based on the developments of recent years, it is now a matter of course to

book tickets for buses and trains with your smart phone or to look for the best restaurant. But what if citizens

and local actors want to play an active role in urban development or monitoring?

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 The City as a System: A Global

Challenge

Global changes, climate change or a constantly grow-

ing world population living in growing cities and ur-

ban agglomerations have an impact on regional and

natural spaces as well as economic, political and

social structures. Figures from the German Fed-

eral Initiative for National Urban Development Pol-

icy (BMVBS, 2008) and the German Federal Min-

istry of Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Research

(Milbert and BBSR, 2015) show that in Germany

about 40% of all inhabitants already live in small and

medium-sized towns and 30% in large cities. In addi-

tion, about 80% of all working people work in cities,

and the trend continues to rise.

Today’s cities are undoubtedly undergoing

change, but are also competing for citizens and

investors, so that not all cities are recording posi-

tive growth rates. This transformation of cities is

inﬂuenced by a multitude of speciﬁc location factors

and the decision for or against moving is often made

dependent on the prospect of an improvement in one’s

own life situation. The trend toward urbanization is

by no means a phenomenon of industrialized nations.

In a global comparison and especially in developing

countries, the proportion of the population living

in cities is increasing, even though the reasons for

urbanization may differ. In the meantime more than

half of the world’s population lives in cities (see

Figure 1), with far-reaching consequences for people

and the environment.

In view of the increasing number of people liv-

ing in cities and the associated social, economic and

ecological impacts, the demands placed on the city

of the future will be different from the previous ones.

Public health care, in particular, will become increas-

ingly important. This also includes the recording and

analysis of environmental conditions with the aid of

spatial data. The transformation into the city of the

future will therefore be accompanied by a small-scale

116

Schima, R., Paschen, M., Dietrich, P., Bumberger, J. and Goblirsch, T.

City of the Future: Urban Monitoring based on Smart Sensors and Open Technologies.

DOI: 10.5220/0007484501160120

In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2019), pages 116-120

ISBN: 978-989-758-355-1

1960

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Population in %

Germany

North America

India

World

Figure 1: Share of the population living in cities in the total population. It should be particularly emphasized that since 2008

more people worldwide live in cities than in rural areas (The World Bank, 2015).

monitoring of microclimatic characteristics of urban

space. Last but not least, a context-related assess-

ment will be increasingly carried out by citizens and

local actors and will be shared, discussed and val-

ued with speciﬁc context knowledge via social net-

works and digital platforms. This process will be de-

cisively inﬂuenced by the already high willingness to

share information and content digitally. Examples in-

clude Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap or Mundraub.org

The digitalization of everyday processes and the high

availability of networked devices as well as the inno-

vations and services derived from them will meet with

acceptance in broad sections of the population similar

to the introduction of smart phones.

2 THE SMART CITY OF THE

FUTURE

2.1 Risks and Opportunities

The changes and challenges that arise when more and

more people live in cities can already be seen today

in modern metropolitan regions. What is certain is

that urbanization does not only bring disadvantages.

Cities and urban agglomerations are centers of inno-

vative developments that permeate society as a whole.

The initiators of these social, cultural, technical or

economic developments are often those actors who

shape their respective environment at the local level

through individual action. Increasing digitalization

in almost all spheres of life opens up new possibili-

ties for the acquisition and provision of information

as well as for social participation. Specialized ser-

vices and a multitude of mobile sensors will change

urban life in the future. The cities of the future will

http://mundraub.org, which offers an open platform

where users can share locations of freely accessible fruit

trees via an integrated map service. More than 30,000 ac-

tive users are now registered.

be networked, and their citizens will be able to access

the information they need as Digital Natives.

Cities offer an attractive infrastructure and guaran-

tee a better education, health and energy supply com-

pared to rural areas. Assuming an environmentally

conscious urban development, the city of the future

can make a signiﬁcant contribution to environmen-

tal and climate protection (Dosch and BMUB, 2015;

United Nations, 2012). On the basis of this progno-

sis, the transformation to a livable, sustainable and

resource-efﬁcient city could also succeed, which in

future will meet social, ecological and economic re-

quirements in the same way (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: City of the future: Transformation into an attrac-

tive, sustainable and resource-efﬁcient city. The digitization

of cities can make a signiﬁcant contribution to meeting the

growing demands of increasing urbanization.

2.2 The Citizen of the Future: Smart

Sensors and Digital Health

The inhabitants of the cities of the future differ from

today’s city dwellers not so much in their character-

istics as in the amount of opportunities they have to

obtain information and actively shape both the city in

which they live and social processes. The increased

demand for information can already be seen today in

the widespread use of smart phones and the mobile

Internet. Today it is an everyday picture that weather

information is retrieved using a smart phone or the

City of the Future: Urban Monitoring based on Smart Sensors and Open Technologies

117

ticket for public transport including the connection is

obtained via an app.

Examples such as ﬁtness apps, wearable sensors

for monitoring body functions or smart weather sta-

tions show not only the willingness but also the need

to measure oneself and one’s environment. This will-

ingness is primarily based on the need to understand

one’s own body and environment and is a rather in-

dividual motivation. The technical measurement of

body functions or the individual measurement of e.g.

air pollution help to better understand and optimize

oneself and one’s own actions, but also to prevent

health risks in general.

Mobile sensors and smart phone apps that pro-

vide these services are already commercially avail-

able, but have not yet penetrated the mass market.

Therefore, the recording of personal (individualized)

environmental impacts has not yet been established

either.

Figure 3: Schematic representation of a provision of en-

vironmental information based on mobile technologies for

mobile and individualized monitoring.

The organism as a living system reacts directly to

changing environmental conditions. In order to be

able to correctly assess a threatening (health) risk, it

is necessary to also record the prevailing environmen-

tal conditions and their effects, which is still a chal-

lenge from the point of view of environmental mea-

surement technology, especially in cities. This is not

least due to the fact that the (local) climate in urban

areas is characterized by a high degree of heterogene-

ity and dynamics due to different buildings, different

forms of use or varying emission properties of the sur-

faces. As a result, even within a small area, differ-

ent environmental conditions have a complex effect

on human well-being and important vital functions.

In addition, the feeling of comfort and the health bur-

den differ from person to person and are inﬂuenced

by numerous boundary conditions. From a scientiﬁc

point of view, the question arises as to how this expe-

rienced situation can be measured and what needs to

be measured to form a reliable database. From a mete-

orological point of view, it must be considered which

parameters can be measured with sufﬁcient accuracy

and which methodical and ﬁnancial effort is required.

Due to their low spatial resolution, conventional ap-

proaches in the ﬁeld of environmental monitoring are

not able to map the dynamics and local characteris-

tics of urban space in all their complexity. For exam-

ple, in Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony (Germany)

with 297.6 km

, three stations are available for the

collection of ﬁne dust measure PM2.5, whereby there

are signiﬁcantly more polarizing ﬁne dust sources in

the city. However, this relatively low compression of

measuring stations reﬂects the current state of the art

in the ﬁeld of environmental monitoring, which is not

least due to the cost- and maintenance-intensive mea-

suring technology.

Although measurement technology should not be

discussed here in detail, it should be noted that polit-

ical decision-makers, municipal companies and ser-

vice providers, as well as scientists and committed

citizens, are confronted with the challenge of cor-

rectly interpreting the special features and problems

of a city, their city, and developing sustainable solu-

tions on the basis of the resources available to them.

The overarching question is therefore how such com-

plex (eco-) systems in their entirety and heterogeneity

can be recorded, evaluated and better understood and

therefore protected (Mead et al., 2013; Duyzer et al.,

2015). This requires new strategies and monitoring

concepts for the holistic consideration of processes

that take place in the environment and are related to

each other.

In the ﬁeld of environmental research, this results

in the necessity to develop cross-scale and above all

adaptive measurement and monitoring strategies. It

can also be stated that, in addition to the classical

approach of institutionalised or ofﬁcial environmen-

tal monitoring, numerous social activities and initia-

tives will also make a signiﬁcant contribution to en-

vironmental monitoring in the future. This will open

up new approaches for proactively shaping the urban

transformation process (Banzhaf et al., 2014). Citi-

zen Science (Bonn et al., 2016; Kolok and Schoen-

fuss, 2011) and the increasing use of mobile tech-

nologies in the urban context (Smart City) are ex-

amples that show the high potential for further de-

velopments in this area. For the sustainable design

of cities and urban spaces, location-based monitoring

data in the sense of an advanced urban development at

local, regional and international level therefore form

an important basis for decision making (Eltges and

Hamann, 2010), in short: the city of the future.

SENSORNETS 2019 - 8th International Conference on Sensor Networks

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Figure 4: Environmentally related parameters of a city can be of different interest depending on the issue and the user. The

challenge is to make the right information available for speciﬁc users.

2.3 Surveying the City: How Sensors

Can Help Improve Quality of Life

The transformation of grown urban development

structures towards a sustainable management and an

increased interest in the individualized recording of

environmental inﬂuences for personal health purposes

are evidence of the need of different user groups for

intelligent and service-oriented environmental moni-

toring (Su et al., 2015; Reis et al., 2015).

Digital change is increasingly changing the ap-

proach to social and ecological issues and at the same

time pushing the boundaries of what is informally

feasible. Driven by buzzwords such as Industry 4.0,

Smart City or the Internet of Things, the digitaliza-

tion of our everyday lives continues to progress. The

constantly increasing number of sensors in almost all

areas of life and ever more powerful computers will

offer the possibility in the future to create an un-

precedented image of the environment and the com-

plex system interrelationships that take place within

it. Due to the large number of people who use smart

phones on a daily basis, innovative services can al-

ready be offered today that transmit location-, time-

and context-speciﬁc information to hundreds of users

according to their needs. The evaluation and analy-

sis of spatial data is used, for example, in the ﬁeld

of trafﬁc planning, including minute-by-minute infor-

mation in the event of trafﬁc delays or in the planning

of people movements during major events. The high

information content is based in particular on the high

number of users within the research area and the fact

that the measuring object, here the geographical loca-

tion, as well as the measuring device (mobile phone

with GPS receiver and mobile Internet) can be clearly

described at the time of data collection. The processes

and algorithms for evaluation based on these data can

thus access a consistent amount of data and provide

the desired information with low latency.

When recording environmental and health risks,

the context-related evaluation and analysis includes

not only the location and time but also other inﬂuenc-

ing factors, local characteristics and historical data.

With the help of this context information, complex

systems can also be recorded and environmental risks

can be derived with regard to the individual person

and his or her individual burden. Despite ofﬁcial mea-

suring systems and a considerable amount of installed

sensors and available sensor information, it is difﬁcult

to determine a user-speciﬁc, individual burden. This

can not least be attributed to the fact that classical

approaches are based on equipping the test persons

with different sensors and measuring systems, but the

data obtained are not sufﬁciently related to the pre-

vailing environmental conditions. In addition, com-

mercially available systems usually represent isolated

solutions and complicate an integrated monitoring ap-

proach across several scales. Often the measuring

systems themselves are limiting factors. For example,

due to the necessity that the test persons have to carry

corresponding measurement systems with them at all

times in order to be able to determine an individual

load. It would therefore be logical to equip each per-

son with an appropriate sensor in order to be able to

record the individual stress of a person. However, this

approach will not become established in the future ei-

ther, since reliable environmental measurement tech-

nology does not ﬁt in size on the one hand and, on the

other hand, an increased technical and methodologi-

cal knowledge of the user would have to be assumed.

City of the Future: Urban Monitoring based on Smart Sensors and Open Technologies

119

3 CONCLUSION – POTENTIAL

AND PROSPECTS FOR THE

CITY OF THE FUTURE

For the city of the future, the question arises as to how

it can be possible to link ofﬁcial measurement systems

with sensor information from the population. The

main issue here is the integration of innovative sensor

technology into existing structures and approaches for

environmental monitoring, which is particularly im-

portant for urban areas. A major challenge here is

the greater involvement of different actors and so-

cial groups. In addition to public authorities and re-

search institutions, social initiatives and committed

citizens will be increasingly involved in answering

environmental and social science questions and will

play a decisive role in shaping the city of the future.

The linking of sensor data with increasingly impor-

tant context and meta information as well as the spe-

ciﬁc provision are therefore central tasks to be solved.

This is the only way to capture the complexity and

heterogeneity of a city holistically and ultimately to

make a general contribution to improving the quality

of life in urban areas.

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