Smart stormwater management in urban areas by roofs greening

By 2050 the world population will grow to about 9 billion contributing to deep changes in urban areas structure. This would increase the effect of water deficiency and along with projected climate changes the impact of urban flood-ings, urban heat islands or drought. Smart cities could be key part of the solution contributing to improve the quality life of citizen in urban areas with the adoption of smart, intelligent technologies and infrastructure for energy, water, mobility, buildings, and government. The concept of smart water refers to the ability to provide and manage this primary resource in quantitative and qualitative terms in order to satisfy the future needs of population. The green roof (GR) is a technique belonging to the sectors of smart energy and smart water. It could provide several benefits: sound and thermal insulation of the buildings, mitigation of the urban heat island effects, reduction of air pollution, additionally, GR induces important hydraulic advantages acting as an effective tool for reducing flood risk in urban area with runoff reduction, attenuation and delay of the peak flow. In this paper, the retention capacity of two green roof test beds located in the campus of University of Salerno has been investigated. The analysis has referred to measures of runoff and rainfall conducted in 2017 during the months of February and March. The two roofs substantially differ in the composition of the water storage layer made up of expanded clay in GR1 and of commercial drainage panels in GR2. The retention capacity of the two test beds has been compared. The results confirm that both green roofs, although to a different extent, are effective for the reduction of total runoff volume of rainwater falling on their area

Mobile Computing, IoT and Big Data for Urban Informatics: Challenges and Opportunities

Over the past few decades, the population in the urban areas has been increasing in a dramatic manner. Currently, about 80% of the U.S. population and about 50% of the world’s population live in urban areas and the population growth rate for urban areas is estimated to be over one million people per week. By 2050, it has been predicted that 64% of people in the developing nations and 85% of people in the developed world would be living in urban areas [1, 2]. Such a dramatic population growth in urban areas has been placing demands on urban infrastructure like never before

Smart Cities and Entrepreneurship: A New Challenge for Universities

The world population is increasingly urbanized. There is a need to analyze current smart urban challenges and opportunities, and to study how to incorporate smart systems into an agenda of urban competitiveness. The smart city approach is a recent theme, aiming at improving the quality of life of citizens in urban territories. Born like a bottom-up movement, it is now becoming critical in urban planning and development in cities all over the world. The smart city success depends on how cities achieve higher innovation profiles and competitiveness levels—on being entrepreneurial smart cities. Universities are one of the most significant cities’ agents on building up active strategies to reinforce an entrepreneurial urban dynamics. Grounded on a vast and deep literature review on both scientific papers and practitioner or institutional reports, the chapter tries to address the role the entrepreneurial university might bring to the formulation and implementation of smart cities strategies, pointing out to some instruments that can be used to enhance urban competitiveness and sustainability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio