Sustainable Operation of Digital Infrastructure in the Smart City: Practical Experience and Implications

In the rapidly evolving landscape of smart cities, the emphasis on leveraging data for urban development often overshadows the critical consideration of how IoT infrastructure will be operated and how Internet of Things (IoT) data is captured. This paper explores the essential elements of establishing a robust IoT network and platform as the foundation for Urban Data Platforms, highlighting the challenges associated with the operation of IoT networks and shows implications for a future operation of the the Smart City infrastructure. The paper delves into practical experiences, shedding light on the intricacies of sustaining digital infrastructure in smart cities. Specifically, it addresses the balance between the functionalities of IoT networks, the scalability of hardware, and the efficient capture of real-time IoT data. The discussion encompasses technological, environmental, and socio-economic aspects, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach to ensure the longevity and sustainability of these digital ecosystems. It states the point that municipal utilities and service providers play a pivotal role as operators of the physical component of the digital infrastructure in this context. Their responsibilities extend beyond the provision of IoT networks to ensuring reliability, scalability, and security. The significance of these actors as cornerstones for the successful implementation and ongoing operation of digital infrastructures in urban. Through an integrative approach, municipal utilities can serve as critical partners in addressing the challenges of urbanization in the era of the Internet of Things, laying the foundation for sustainable, liveable cities

ODD – Operational Design Domain as Test Arrangement for the Future Automatisation of Road Traffic

Following contribution refers to preceding results presented in German at CORP 2019 and CORP 2020 on the issue how automatization will change and shape future mobility. Some recent knowledge of our work should be a topic for further critical discussion about technical progress triggered by automotive industries. However, are we as planners from the outside prepared for that? Within the year 2024, the equipment of new vehicles with ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems) will be obligatory by law. Have been such applications according to automation grade 3 efficient proved in respect of daily road traffic? Who can give answers to new cars assessment of it? One of the proving approaches are so-called Operational Design Domains (ODD). A professional guideline defines an ODD as “operating conditions under which a given driving automation system or feature thereof is specifically designed to function, including, but not limited to, environmental, geographical, and time-of-day restrictions, and/or the requisite presence or absence of certain traffic or roadway characteristics.” ODD is the design domain of an ADAS or a feature thereof with respect to its operation.” This approach can serve as a strategic instrument to prepare the implementation of autonomous driving via the automatization of road traffic into the mobility system on the long view. Now, what tasks of testing activities are required? • Testing technical efficiency of relevant instruments (off-road) • Finding practical insufficiencies of functionalities based on test arrangements (on test grounds) • System proving of driving practice (feasibility-check on-road) • Authorization of vehicle´s types (reliability- and safety-checks) • Adaptions of road-network for automatization of road traffic (as task by road providers) • Assessment of sociability in settlement areas (need of regional regulations in urban road spaces) Therefore, a broad field of interrogative activities ought to have done before a deployment of highly automated or even autonomous moving vehicles penetrates the markets. If they reach a considerable amount within the car´s stock, it might be too late for assessment studies. “We will look what would happen” as negligent political strategy seems indolent facing the historical developed miscellaneous road network in Europe, which somewhere lacks of large scale in comparison with America´s grid of streets and highways. Automatization of cars deals with a manifold topic driven by automotive industrial progress using hard- and software tools of digitalization, automatization and interconnectivity. The topic, what technical support needs automatization of road operations, stands at the very beginning of the discourse about future motorized mobility. At first, we focus the view on a vehicle as moving body flowing in traffic and interacting with other traffic participants. Dependent on automation-grade of vehicle´s stock different with automat-functionalities equipped cars are objects for testing arrangements (Fig. 1). Pure technical capacities and the reliability of quality to cope with a certain functional task are next to prove. That represents the view into the car, though it effects outside other traffic participants. On the contrary, a bird´s eye-view on the cars flowing onto carriageways represents the complementary view (Fig. 3). These antagonistic views on the automatization of motor vehicles unveils possibly weaknesses of the usage of technologies hardware-side, like sensors for detection of open paths (Fig. 2), and software-side, where signals are processed to car-inherent scenarios. Bearers of homologation of single functionalities ought to complement their proving by holistic arrangements aiming at the car-inherent system architecture to evaluate the effects affecting other road users in respect of its personal integrity and safety (Fig. 5)

Evaluating the Impact of Urbanisation on Climate Change: A Case of Kochi City, Kerala State, India

Urbanization significantly impacts climate by intensifying the urban heat island (UHI) effect, leading to increased heat-related risks from climate change. Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) during urbanization processes exacerbate heat stress in growing cities. The urban surface composition, structure, and emissions from various activities contribute to local climate changes that can be more pronounced than global climate predictions. With over half of the world's population residing in cities, which are often densely populated, the current urban population of 55% is projected to reach 68% by 2050. Cities typically have temperatures that are 2-3 °C warmer than their surroundings, with nighttime and wintertime variations being the biggest. Urban climate impacts like these make inhabitants more susceptible to upcoming environmental shifts, which makes cities ideal locations for climate adaptation and mitigation. The urban heat island effect, which occurs when cities are much warmer than surrounding rural regions, can amplify the effects of heat waves and increase urban energy demand for cooling. Keeping the aforesaid knowledge in mind, Kochi, a coastal city in Kerala State has been chosen as the study region for further detailed investigation. The study aims to evaluate the urban growth in the city over two decades from 2001 to 2021 and has an impact on the effect of urban heat islands through spatiotemporal analysis. The thermal load and dynamic potential layers are evaluated and integrated to generate a Climate Analysis Map to explore the hotspots of the study region. Based on the findings, the study concludes with plausible guidelines and strategies to minimize the impact UHI effect and to promote a sustainable built environment

Decoding Stress – ein interdisziplinärer Analyseansatz zur Identifikation Stress auslösender Faktoren für den urbanen Rad- und Fußverkehr

Wie nehmen wir Stadträume wahr, wenn wir mit dem Fahrrad oder zu Fuß unterwegs sind? An welchen Orten in der Stadt fühlen wir uns wohl, respektive unwohl und gestresst? Welche spezifischen Faktoren beeinflussen dabei unsere Emotionen? Und vor allem: Mit welchen Methoden können diese Einflussfaktoren entschlüsselt werden? Ausgehend von den Emo-Cycling-Stressmessungen der Urban Emotions Initiative (Zeile et al., 2014). untersucht die Studie „Decoding Stress“ auffallende Stress-Hotspots für Radfahrende im urbanen Kontext. Im Fokus steht dabei die Entwicklung eines interdisziplinären und multimodalen Analyseansatzes zur Erweiterung der Stressorenanalyse. Neben diversen digitalen Analysemethoden beschäftigt sich der vorgestellte Forschungsansatz dabei intensiv mit der Erweiterung der Methodik um einen bislang vorwiegend im Bereich der Architektur und Stadtplanung bekannten, „analogen“ Werkzeugkasten (Eckart, 2014). Mithilfe dieses Methodenmix erprobt die Studie einen holistischen Analyseansatz, der erstmals quantifizierbare „harte“ Faktoren und qualifizierbare „weiche“ Faktoren gleichermaßen berücksichtigt. Die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse leisten einen Beitrag dazu, die interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit von Stadt- und Verkehrsplanung zu fördern und gemeinsame Lösungsansätze für qualitätsvolle und menschengerechte öffentliche Stadträume zu erarbeiten. In diesem Beitrag werden die im Jahr 2023 durchgeführten Stressorenanalysen aus den vier Fallstudien in den Untersuchungsstädten Karlsruhe und Osnabrück vorgestellt und miteinander verglichen. Dabei werden die angeführten Analysen einerseits inhaltlich hinsichtlich erster gewonnener Erkenntnisse ausgewertet und andererseits die angewandte Methodik evaluiert und hinsichtlich einer möglichen Weiterentwicklung geprüft

The Built Environment and Universal Design: Are Architectural Competitions a Qualified Instrument to a Better Consideration of the Diversity Dimension Impairment?

Procedures of building planning and delivery are of crucial importance in generating better and more inclusive built enviroments (named “architecture” from here on) following the idea of Design for All/Universal Design. In contrast to other “products” of the everyday life, architecture is comparably complex in generation and maintenance, given the multitude of stakeholders involved in generation and operation, the longevity of interventions, the involved cost, and its role in ecological, economical and social dimension of mankind. Needless to say, architecture has a significant impact on society aspects, and thus also on the different diversity dimensions of societies. To ensure high quality in interventions toward the built enviroment, the instrument “architectural competitions” has been established decades, if not centuries ago. Today, usual architectural competitions target the call for high-quality design ideas or suggestions for specific requirements within the built enviroment. Architectural competitions differ in their scope, their procedural and organisational structure, the number of competition entries, and other methodological aspects. Typical timeframes for architectural competitions take 6 to 8 weeks of preperation work and 8 to 15 weeks of time for competition entry developments, and – in most cases – the winning project is intented to be realized/built. This paper presents concept, method, and results of an empirical study pertaining to the relation of architectural competitions and the consideration of Universal Design/Design for All aspects within the competition. Thereby, both the call for entries and the overall provided information, as well as a comparable large number of competition entries was examined in a structured process: In a first step, we generated a checklist template that targeted different aspects related to Universal Design/Design for All in the framework of the competition call for tender. The checklist was also adapted for evaluation of aspects of Design for All within examined competition entries. In a second step, recently conducted architectural competitions were selected. For these competitions we collected both the call for tender documents, as well as selected competition entries. Subsequently, the checklist was applied on the collected data, to generate both quantitative results and to identify good and bad practices regarding the consideration of universal design aspects within the competitions. 15 different architectural competitions and 76 competition entries were analyzed. The consideration of Universal Design aspects in the entries happened mostly rudimentary, but some specific best practice and worst practice cases could be identified. A major finding of the overall evaluation procedure is that – disappointingly – there is a lot of improvement potential for a better consideration of Design for All/Universal Design aspects in this early phase of building delivery processes

Examination of Sustainable Human Resource Management on Employee Performance Indicators

In recent years, the topic of sustainable human resource management (SHRM) has become increasingly important (Piwowar-Sulej, 2021). The benefits of SHRM are becoming increasingly apparent, particularly in light of the shortage of skilled workers and the demographic change as SHRM is expected to enhance commitment (Ehnert, Parsa, Roper, Wagner & Müller-Camen, 2016). Thus, retention management via SHRM is in the limelight instead of recruitment of employees. However, the integration of social, economical and environmental sustainability within human resource management (HRM) strategy is often lacking and thus an innovative aspect (Ehnert et al., 2016; Kramar, 2022; Piwowar-Sulej, 2021). Moreover, the benefits of SHRM and the impact on employee performance indicators have rarely been analyzed empirically (Peerzadah, Mufti & Nazir, 2018). Thus, this paper aims at closing this gap by answering the following research question: To what degree does SHRM increase or decrease employee performance indicators? This study contributes to the social dimension of sustainability and thus contributes to the current SHRM debate with the aim of gaining insights into the impact of SHRM practices on employee performance, which will be evaluted quantitatively in order to close the aforementioned gap. Thus, a conceptual framework based on existing literature, the transactional stress model (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) as well as the Job Demands-Resources model by Bakker and Demerouti (2007) will be developed. The framework is used to evaluate the impact of SHRM on employee stress, employee engagement, employee turnover and affective commitment. It is anticipated that a deeper understanding will be gained regarding the relevance of SHRM in business environments

Ageing Smart – Digital Instruments in a Municipal Context: Data, Analyses and Strategies (not only) for Baby Boomers

The project addresses the baby boomers born between 1955 and 1969. As they gradually enter retirement age, municipalities are required to create age-appropriate residential locations and supply structures. The project brings together spatial planning, infrastructural and supply-side approaches from the perspective of the “baby boomers” and the municipalities. The aim is to develop a data-supported decision support system (DSS) that serves as a decision-making aid for public actors in their planning processes. The research project focuses on three fields of investigation: Residential locations and the associated requirements for opportunities in the residential environment and mobility, behaviour with regard to leisure and recreational activities and the provision of medical and related health infrastructures.

Passive Cooling Technologies for Reducing the Heating of Containers

Containers are widely used within the Bundeswehr, especially in military camps. These containers often overheat, most notably in southern areas. High temperatures can cause problems like accelerated ageing of stored material or failure of electronic equipment running inside. Air conditioning systems can counteract this but consume high amounts of energy and require regular maintenance. Passive cooling technologies, i.e. technologies that cool without requiring additional energy, are intended to alleviate this problem. The simplest passive cooling technology is shading e.g. by applying additional roofing or camouflage nets. However, the disadvantages are the additional required material and the assembly and disassembly whenever the container is moved. New technologies for passive cooling are based on different mechanisms: Coatings can reduce the solar heat-up either by being highly reflective or through a novel mechanism called passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC). Another technique is the use of heat storage panels, which contain phase change material (PCM) to minimize the daytime heating of the containers. Furthermore, spacer fabrics on the surface of containers allow cooling based on the chimney effect. To evaluate the passive cooling power of the different technologies, containers were equipped with three different cooling coating systems, heat storage panels, spacer fabrics, roofing and camouflage net. Two regular containers were used as a baseline. Temperature was measured at each container at different spots inside and outside. Further, every container was equipped with an air conditioning system and a power meter to measure energy consumption. All containers with passive cooling technologies showed lower temperatures compared to the reference containers. The power measurements confirmed a lower energy consumption of the air-conditioning systems. PDRC coatings, PCMs und spacer fabrics show a better passive cooling power than shadowing like e.g. roofing. PDRC coatings were the most effective technology overall in this setup, but dependent on the application scenarios, the other passive cooling systems can also be powerful

Smart Cities and Infrastructure Development: A Case Study of the Gauteng City Region in South Africa

Infrastructure development is a critical enabler of socio-economic development and contributes to raising the quality of life through the creation of social amenities and consequently contribute to macro-economic stability. Smart city has recently become a buzz concept that leads the way to an inclusive and democratic urban future planning and urban growth. In South Africa, generally, the communities are in search of urban prospects and as a result are disadvantaged as an unintended consequence. This is primarily due to a lack of bulk infrastructure services such as sanitation and water treatment, which is unable to cope thereof, necessitating Smart City to become a high-impact, compact, complex, mixed-use urban development that is designed to deliver urban prospects to a more marginalized periphery. Whilst various components and processes which play a vital role in developing or creating smart cities have been discussed in detail over the years, there is still a need to demonstrate the role and interventions towards the economic development of the City of Johannesburg, particularly in urban areas in the Global South. Consequently, this paper explores the impact of Smart City initiatives on socio-economic development in the greater Gauteng City Region, South Africa. The work adopts a phenological case study research design and a qualitative approach to gather data through a series of desktop research and literature reviews. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis as a research method to reveal themes on inclusivity and access and Excel software package was applied to obtain descriptive statistical results. Also, a systematic review of the literature to analyze Smart City strategies embedded in the spatial development framework. Findings reveal the crucial role of effective urban development planning in the economic infrastructure value chain. Successful Smart City implementation contributes significantly to economic growth, diversification, and improved access to modern technology. The paper concludes further that smart city initiatives and state investment in infrastructure contribute largely to economic growth as a benefit, as well as diversification of the economy, thereby providing access to modern technology. The study recommends an inclusive and integrated policy framework for resource allocation aligned with growth and development in Smart City initiatives, ensuring a cohesive approach

Fourth Nature: Regenerating Cosmicity

What characterizes the New Era? The New Era signifies a shift towards a heightened consciousness of interconnectedness and responsibilities, both within ourselves and with the external world. Our homes and cities are built in a way that discourages meaningful connections and lacks a sense of cosmic integration - they exist in isolation from the natural order. As humans, endowed with unique capabilities, we play a role in co-creating our reality. This underscores the importance of urban regeneration, which must occur in tandem with human evolution. Nature is ready to initiate the necessary regeneration urgently required. "Because we, as proud children of science and reason, have made ourselves orphans of ancestral knowledge and Nature wisdom" - as says Chopra. This is where the Fourth Nature concept emerges, offering a path forward: it ignites a new consciousness within us and becomes manifest in our living spaces The failures observed in current models stem from our failure to acknowledge ourselves and our creations as integral parts of Nature. While this separation may exist primarily in our minds, its effects are profound. To harness the full potential of our technological advancements, we must cultivate greater sensitivity, for the betterment of our own well-being and that of all humanity. It signifies a new paradigm. Our evolutionary journey depends on a significant leap in consciousness - embracing cosmicity, the state of being cosmic, integrated, and interconnected. The absence of Nature in our cities and lives is no longer tenable. The repercussions of this disconnect are palpable: natural calamities, widespread hunger, and pervasive poverty, despite the Earth's inherent abundance. Regeneration extends beyond brownfields; it is imperative across all urbanized areas where Nature has been neglected, disregarded, or excluded. The city of Porto Alegre, for example, has a former industrial area called Fourth District - a zone where Nature shows its power and presence amidst neglect. Towering trees calmly observe humanity's struggles under its shadow. Wild fruits and flowers thrive along walkways, while old buildings offer shelter to residents on cozy balconies and benches, in an interesting scale. Revitalizing this area may not be as daunting as it might seem. It involves more than mere preservation or devastation; it entails understanding the quality of the pre-existence as well as restoring the connection to local food production, implementing sustainable waste and rainwater management strategies, and employing intelligent, cost-effective building practices. This paper explores the idea that the success of the New Era hinges on such actions - where healthy living is not merely an option but the most accessible choice for all