INTERACTIVE SPATIALWEB-APPLICATIONS AS NEWMEANS OF SUPPORT FOR URBAN DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES

Citizen participation, co-creation – a joint development of professionals and citizens – initiatives for urban planning processes have increased significantly during the last few years. This development has been strongly supported by the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). E.g., it has never been easier to get information through your mobile devices wherever and whenever you want it. Public open spatial data is available in many cities around the world and web-based applications use this data to provide tools and services for many different topics such as traffic information, or the communication of health-related information (e.g. ozone, particulate matter or pollen loads). This paper presents typical problems of such web-applications in terms of application design and implementation and usability evaluation via describing three case study applications which have been developed recently. It tries to answer the question: How can this kind of geo-services be developed and used by scientists to enable public participation within data gathering and urban planning processes? All three applications have the common goal to provide interactive geo-visualization and analysis features which are tailored to support users in their urban planning processes. The innovation of those applications lies in their flexibility regarding the topics they can tackle and their capability to perform interactive analyses triggered by the user. The applications have been built with a strong focus on exploring the available data (e.g. Open Government Data – OGD). Two of the applications have been implemented using the R-Shiny framework, the third application, the smarticipate platform, has been developed using ReactJS for the front-end, running a MongoDB in the background which is fed via a micro-service framework. In the latter application, the users can configure topics, i.e. the platform enables the user to create new services for different planning issues

Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Integrating Multidisciplinary Data in Urban Models

This book is devoted to the modeling and understanding of complex urban systems. This second volume of Understanding Complex Urban Systems focuses on the challenges of the modeling tools, concerning, e.g., the quality and quantity of data and the selection of an appropriate modeling approach. It is meant to support urban decision-makers—including municipal politicians, spatial planners, and citizen groups—in choosing an appropriate modeling approach for their particular modeling requirements. The contributors to this volume are from different disciplines, but all share the same goal: optimizing the representation of complex urban systems. They present and discuss a variety of approaches for dealing with data-availability problems and finding appropriate modeling approaches—and not only in terms of computer modeling. The selection of articles featured in this volume reflect a broad variety of new and established modeling approaches such as: - An argument for using Big Data methods in conjunction with Agent-based Modeling; - The introduction of a participatory approach involving citizens, in order to utilize an Agent-based Modeling approach to simulate urban-growth scenarios; - A presentation of semantic modeling to enable a flexible application of modeling methods and a flexible exchange of data; - An article about a nested-systems approach to analyzing a city’s interdependent subsystems (according to these subsystems’ different velocities of change); - An article about methods that use Luhmann’s system theory to characterize cities as systems that are composed of flows; - An article that demonstrates how the Sen-Nussbaum Capabilities Approach can be used in urban systems to measure household well-being shifts that occur in response to the resettlement of urban households; - A final article that illustrates how Adaptive Cycles of Complex Adaptive Systems, as well as innovation, can be applied to gain a better understanding of cities and to promote more resilient and more sustainable urban futures

Accelerating transition dynamics in city regions: A qualitative modeling perspective

textabstractIn this article, we take stock of the findings from conceptual and empirical work on the role of transition initiatives for accelerating transitions as input for modeling acceleration dynamics. We applied the qualitative modeling approach of causal loop diagrams to capture the dynamics of a single transition initiative evolving within its regional context. In doing so, we aim to address two key challenges in transition modeling, namely conceptualization, and the framing of empirical insights obtained for various case study regions in a consistent modeling framework. Our results show that through this systematic approach one can translate conceptual and qualitative empirical work into a transition model design. Moreover, the causal loop diagrams can be used as discussion tools to support dialogue among researchers and stakeholders, and may support a comparison of transition dynamics across case-study regions. We reflect on main limitations related to empirical model validation (lack of data) and to model structure (high level of aggregation), and describe next steps for moving from a qualitative single transition initiative to a quantitative multiple transition initiatives model

Assessing Present and Future Ozone Hazards to Natural Forests in the Alpine Area \u2014 Comparison of a Wide Scale Mapping Technique with Local Passive Sampler Measurements

Il capitolo mostra i risultati degli esercizi di valutazione del rischio ozono per le foreste della Valle Camonica. L'esercizio ha visto la compbinazione di misure sul terreno con campionatori passivi e laboratori mobili, e di strumenti modellistici ad ampia scala