In addressing the challenges to meet the 2050 Greenhouse Gas reduction targets for Europe coupled with the aspirations to improve sustainability and liveability, it is critical that city planners, developers and decision-makers have the capacity to understand how city systems operate, how they interact, and what impact changes to systems has on the system itself and other interacting systems. The growing complexity of city systems and the added complexity of external and growing pressures means that solutions which model, analyse, and help to operationalize systems are more needed than ever before, and inherently require a greater degree of sophistication than ever before.
This project builds on the work of the Sustainable City Systems Platform, which has identified urban design, planning and management solutions as one of the biggest opportunity areas for the Climate-KIC and therefore one of three priority areas for 2014
Project description
City planners today are challenged by progressing climate-change, missing urban resources, demographic and economical pressures. The transition to becoming a 2kW- and 1t CO2 society comes with large uncertainties. Among the impending urban challenges the most challenging might be: can we arrive at integrated and systemic approaches for urban planning and management? Can we arrive at a cross-disciplinary dialogue for climate-aware and resource-efficient planning and management of cities? Can we co-create an economically vital innovation community that provide simplified access to novel solutions for climate- and resource-friendly cities on multiple scales of business? Can we bring complex system interdependencies together as that we can allow “little information” for smart decision-making and still use limited information and yet arrive at smart decision-making?
Climate-KIC and especially the Sustainable Cities System challenge platform (SCS) within Climate-KIC (CKIC) provide already an environment for innovating and deploying next-generation solutions for sustainable urban futures. With this present proposal SCS proposes a program of activities, which aims to integrate CKIC best practises, running and future CKIC projects into a modular ICT platform for city systems. The Modelling City Systems programme will be co-created by internationally renowned academic and leading business partners of Climate-KIC. The programme will develop and deliver a suite of analysis, design, and operational execution solutions to support the modelling, development and implementation of sustainable cities and districts across Europe and more widely. It is intended to be an on-going programme for the Climate-KIC and partners, and build upon many other Climate-KIC programmes and projects arriving at integrated and comprehensive solutions for sustainable urban futures.
The Modelling City Systems programme will provide
(a) Novel approaches for Climate Change mitigation and adaptation in the form of new marketable products, incorporated into a data architecture, solutions and workflows for different use cases
- A Climate-KIC community-driven approach to bridge, foster and outreach
- inter-Climate-KIC- project collaboration,
- reutilisation and transfer of Climate-KIC KPIs as platform solutions to partner projects and cities, and to scope
- coordinated activities innovation, education and entrepreneurship activities.
(b) An online market place through key Climate-KIC business partners and thus a core repository of innovative solutions and guidelines for integrated, climate-aware planning and management of cities in Europe and abroad.
Key activities of the programme will include an incubator base to co-ordinate, to integrate and to scope development of all related activity being undertaken with full Climate-KIC support. Further Modelling City Systems act as the catalyser to these Climate-KIC-based solutions for application in relevant Climate-KIC and partner projects and cities as well as abroad the European context through an online ICT marketplace for integrated city planning and management.
Project sponsors
European Institute of Innovation and Technology (eit) - Climate-KIC
Project contributors
- Prof. Dr. Thomas H. Kolbe
- Maximilian Sindram
- Kanishk Chaturvedi
- Mostafa ElFouly
- Zhihang Yao
Project partners
- ESRI
- ETH Zürich
- Imperial College London
- Intitute for Sustainability London
- SmarterBetterCities
- TNO
- TU Berlin
- TU München
