Virtual regeneration

Regenerating our increasingly polluted, worn-out urban infrastructure is becoming the singly most important challenge facing our cities. Simon Doyle and Michael Batty explain how spatial information technologies and online laboratories can enable many diverse interests to participate in creating informed planning policies that best address these issues

Long-distance frequency transfer over an urban fiber link using optical phase stabilization

We transferred the frequency of an ultra-stable laser over 86 km of urban fiber. The link is composed of two cascaded 43-km fibers connecting two laboratories, LNE-SYRTE and LPL in Paris area. In an effort to realistically demonstrate a link of 172 km without using spooled fiber extensions, we implemented a recirculation loop to double the length of the urban fiber link. The link is fed with a 1542-nm cavity stabilized fiber laser having a sub-Hz linewidth. The fiber-induced phase noise is measured and cancelled with an all fiber-based interferometer using commercial off the shelf pigtailed telecommunication components. The compensated link shows an Allan deviation of a few 10-16 at one second and a few 10-19 at 10,000 seconds

Utilizing Urban Living Laboratories for Social Innovation

Cities have long been recognized as potential hubs of knowledge, social and cultural diversity, jobs, education, public services, and infrastructure. Alongside these opportunities, however, cities also face a changing climate, reduced availability of raw materials and natural resources, and dwindling physical space for the built environment. These challenges are accompanied by increasing disparities in income and resultant social inequalities; mounting threats to human health, well-being, and food security; growing refugee and migration influxes; and demographic changes. These concerns and associated governance challenges increase the urgency for new socially, ecologically, and culturally sensitive approaches to urban development. Such approaches need not only to reduce human vulnerability and environmental footprints, but also to build social cohesion and support ecological sustainability, cultural integration, and the establishment of a shared identity between citizens within a just system of distribution and access to urban resources and wealth

Proximity-based urban planning models as the inter-face between governments and makers, designers, and citizens towards distributed economies.

Standard urban planning models are nowadays being redefined with a renewed focus on reducing mobility times: proximity, walkability, self-sufficiency. Reconfiguring how cities, their flows, and services are organized also requires designers and citizens, with a potential role for the Maker Movement and Distributed Economies. We focus here on how urban creative communities and maker laboratories could become public empowerment services by, for and with citizens within proximity of urban planning models. We propose a framework for such Proximity-based Making and Community Services based on 1) defining them as connecting makers, designers, citizens, and maker laboratories, 2) via digital technologies network into Distributed Economies, 3) interacting with Governments through the interface of proximity-based urban models, governances, and policies. The framework has a descriptive model and an assessment indicator based on people, organizations, and policies for a) understanding current urban making, b) planning new services or c) developing new policies for them

From grey towards green: about the urban energy fold at Symbiont City

Instead of the energy and ecological relocation, SYMBIONT City detects energy opportunities and possible urban folding to achieve thermodynamic benefits. Although some agendas have already fostered the concept of symbiotic planning, neither current infrastructural systems nor urban regulatory frameworks allow for its real implementation. SYMBIONT is a set of local laboratories designed to enable new synergies between waste, energy and information flows on existing urban waste transfer facilities. It pretends to raise the level of urban resilience in cities by acting on existing urban facilities and adjacent urban setting through the implementation of local laboratories able to monitor, process, and reconnect existing waste, energy and information flows while recovering the notion of infrastructure as public space through social engagement actions. These spatial facilities have a strategic value as nodal urban locations—with potential phase-change capacity—for neighbourhood waste and energy flows. These micro-infrastructural interventions will help in the aforementioned transition allowing for a turn from “grey” towards “green” infrastructures, with capacity to provide social, ecological and economic benefits to urban communities such as reduction of waste disposal, local energy generation and storage, improvement of air quality, reduction of energy costs and new opportunities to social cohesion and engagement

Community Voices: Healthcare for the Undeserved

Thirteen diverse communities - or learning laboratories - across the country serve as working centers that sort out what works from what does not in meeting the needs of those who receive inadequate or no health care. These learning laboratories were selected to serve some of the hardest-to-reach populations including those living in poor urban and rural areas, immigrants, Native Americans and the homeless

High-resolution optical frequency dissemination on a telecommunication network with data traffic

We transferred the frequency of an ultra-stable laser over a 108 km urban fiber link comprising 22 km of optical communications network fiber simultaneously carrying Internet data traffic. The metrological signal and the digital data signal are transferred on two different frequency channels in a dense wavelength division multiplexing scheme. The metrological signal is inserted into and extracted from the communications network by using bidirectional off-the-shelf optical add-drop multiplexers. The link-induced phase noise is measured and cancelled with round-trip technique using an all-fiber-based interferometer. The compensated link shows an Allan deviation of a few 10-16 at one second and below 10-19 at 10,000 seconds. This opens the way to a wide dissemination of ultra stable optical clock signals between distant laboratories via the Internet network

Normal background concentrations (NBCs) of contaminants in English soils : final project report

The British Geological Survey (BGS) has been commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to give guidance on what are normal levels of contaminants in English soils in support of the Part 2A Contaminated Land Statutory Guidance. This has initially been done by studying the distribution of four contaminants – arsenic, lead, benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) and asbestos – in topsoils from England. This work was extended to a further four contaminants (cadmium, copper, nickel and mercury) which enabled methodologies developed to be tested on a larger range of contaminants. The first phase of the Project gathered data sets that were: nationally extensive; systematically collected so a broad range of land uses were represented; and collected and analysed to demonstrably and acceptable levels of quality. Information on the soil contaminant concentrations in urban areas was of particular importance as the normal background is considered to be a combination of both natural and diffuse anthropogenic contributions to the soil. Issues of soil quality are most important in areas where these affect most people, namely, the urban environment. The two principal data sets used in this work are the BGS Geochemical Baseline Survey of the Environment (G-BASE) rural and urban topsoils (37,269 samples) and the English NSI (National Soil Inventory) topsoils (4,864 samples) reanalysed at the BGS laboratories by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRFS) so both data sets were highly compatible. These two data sets provide results for most inorganic element contaminants, though results explored for mercury and BaP are drawn from a variety of different and much less extensive data sets