Webinar #1 | Space applications for urban challenges: Urban planning
Watch the webinar
As part of SPACE4Cities’ Open Market Consultation (OMC), the OMC Webinar Series aims to foster interactions between our procurer cities and all kinds of suppliers – companies, research institutes or non-profits. Participating in the webinar allows the participants to directly ask questions to procurers via Slido, to anticipate procurers’ needs and to prepare for the €2.87 million call for tenders by influencing our requirements. The webinar will be recorded and made available to registered participants after the event. See the full agenda below.
The first session will focus on the challenges SPACE4Cities local authorities are facing when it comes to urban planning and infrastructure management. In that sense, public procurers need up-to-date and accurate data as well as advanced digital tools to maintain (as real-time as possible) urban data repositories, simulate potential urban developments, and render these simulations in detailed 3D visualisations.
Agenda
- 10 min Introduction to SPACE4Cities and the OMC (Alan Mandrillon, Aerospace Valley)
- 25 min Presentation of the Urban planning Challenge and its sub-challenges:
- Built environment planning (Dieter Nieuwborg & Thimo Thoeye, City of Ghent)
- Air quality and energy transition (Weiyi Ding, Gemeente Amsterdam)
- Improved data and features for digital twins (Carlos Ribeiro, Municipio Guimarães)
- 20 min Requirements and evaluation criteria (Boen Groothoff, Gemeente Amsterdam)
- 10 min Q&A
- 10 min Presenting the PCP process (Renske Martijnse-Hartikka, Forum Virium Helsinki)
- 10 min Q&A
- 5 min Wrap up and next steps (Alan Mandrillon, Aerospace Valley)
Context
Although they cover only 2% of the EU territory, 75% of the EU population live in cities (Reference: Continuing urbanisation | Knowledge for policy (europa.eu)). This concentration is further accelerated by an ongoing urbanisation that forces local authorities to optimise urban space. Hence, understanding and mapping a given territory is one of the first vital missions of cities to sustain their liveability and resilience. To that end, Earth observation data, including satellite imagery, is a proven tool to understand, plan, monitor and model urban growth, and sprawl, informal dwellings, urban degradation, urban ecology and population distribution.
While built-up areas are set to reach 7% of EU area by 2030, European cities need new tools to closely monitor their land cover and change as the European Commission has set the goal of stopping land take by 2050 in the EU Soil strategy.
Urban planning also very often deals with transformative urban projects like:
- Energy infrastructures like renewables (solar roofs and facades, urban wind, electricity access mapping, etc.),
- Real estate and industrial buildings,
- Civil engineering projects, and transportation and telecommunication networks.
All of these cases can benefit from space-based data at different stages, from planning new infrastructure projects, permitting, monitoring construction or destruction works, to assessing their impact on the environment (biodiversity, GHG emissions, soil erosion, or urban subsidence). Such tools include for instance the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service’ Urban Atlas or change detection algorithms related to land cover.
In addition to EO data, GNSS applications can contribute to smart streetlights and smart waste management. Eventually, combination of EO data and GNSS technologies allows urban surveying and mapping, modelling of urban scenarios and effective visualisation in 3D models and digital twins.