Smart Cities, Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2019) – 8 articles

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are frequently used to exchange 2D & 3D data, in areas such as city planning, disaster management, urban navigation and many more. City Geography Mark-up Language (CityGML), an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard has been developed for the storage and exchange of 3D city models. Due to its encoding in XML based format, the data transfer efficiency is reduced which leads to data storage issues. The use of CityGML for analysis purposes is limited due to its inefficiency in terms of file size and bandwidth consumption. This paper introduces XML based compression technique and elaborates how data efficiency can be achieved with the use of schema-aware encoder. We particularly present CityGML Schema Aware Compressor (CitySAC), which is a compression approach for CityGML data transaction within SDI framework. Our test results show that the encoding system produces smaller file size in comparison with existing state-of-the-art compression methods. The encoding process significantly reduces the file size up to 7–10% of the original data. Full article

The emergence of Big Data, accelerated through the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence, from the emerging, contemporary concept of smart cities coupled with that of the notion for safe cities is raising concerns of privacy and good governance that are impacting on socio-economic and liveability dimensions of urban fabrics. As these gain ground, largely due to economic pressures from large ICT providers, there is a notable increase towards the need for inclusion of human dimensions, complemented by the use of technology. However, the latter is seen as catalysing elements of control and propaganda which are thriving through oversimplified and non-inclusive urban IT policy measures. This paper dwells on the intersecting subjects of smart and safe cities and explores the highlighted issues that are deemed to cause concern and further explore the need for transparency and inclusivity in urban processes and systems. This paper is oriented towards urban planners and policy makers looking at the implementation of smart and safe cities concepts. Full article

The commitment to improve energy and environmental performance in public administration is essential for the development models geared towards lasting sustainability. The Public Administration (PA) in Italy, in particular, plays a key role to affirm models oriented towards energy and environmental sustainability, thanks to a wider and more innovative approach. The PA has a dual consumer/user role, public heritage, and decision maker/planner, in promoting energy efficiency at the local level, in the light of specific problems and peculiarities. For several decades, initiatives have been launched at various levels to improve energy and environmental performance in the public administration. The aim of this study is to outline, from a critical perspective, the state of the art policy makers in Italy about energy efficiency measures in public administration. There are, however, many cultural, value-related, financial, technological, institutional, and operational issues in the PA sector that limit investments in energy efficiency. It should be noted that if, on the one hand, the PA shows a lack of knowledge and is unwilling to adopt practices and systemic tools for monitoring and control, and on the other, in terms of bureaucracy, the system appears to be far too complicated and costly. The multiple benefits linked to improved energy performance would therefore require that the PA rethink their organizational and functional models, put in place more flexible and less bureaucratic forms of management and a more dynamic, pervasive, and proactive approach towards initiatives that promote energy efficiency. The research is a contribution towards identifying the driving forces behind potential systems and tools for energy efficiency in the PA, highlighting both critical elements and opportunities, and in particular, the limits deriving from the technological, managerial, and organizational options available for energy efficiency enhancement in the sector of the Italian PA. Full article

This article investigates the intersection and convergence of Smart Cities and Creative Cities that emerge with the availability of social media data, technology—smart technologies—and the shifting mode of cultural production—creative economies—forming a new nexus of Smart-Cultural Cities. It starts with a short review of literature surrounding Smart Cities and Creative Cities to establish domain criteria on Smart-Cultural Cities for Singapore. The article draws on a database of actors from authorities, industries, academia, and artists established by the research community in Singapore. Actors and domains are described using bipartite graphs and then analyzed by solving a deterministic optimization problem rather than computing a statistic. The result of this analysis reveals new clusters, nodes, and connections in the actor–domain network of the Singapore Smart-Cultural Cities discourse. The identified clusters are called “Urban Scenario Makers”, “Digital Cultural Transformers” and “Public Engagers”. The method gives significant insights on the number of clusters, the composition of each cluster, and the relationship between clusters that serve to locate and describe a next iteration of the Smart City that focusses on human interaction, culture, and technology. Full article

The development of crowdsensing-based technologies has allowed for the use of smartphones in large-scale data collection for different scopes of applications, mostly in a transparent and ubiquitous way. When concerning urban areas and smart city initiatives, the collection and further analysis of information about the highest number of vehicles is of paramount importance, potentially supporting more efficient mobility planning and management actions in modern cities. In this context, this article proposes a public general-purpose platform for acquisition and visualization of vehicular speeds, which can then be exploited by any additional application. For that, a crowdsensing-based mobile software application was developed to collect instantaneous speeds provided by smartphone GPS, formatting and distributing this information to a database system. Such historical data can then be exported or visualized through a web-based comprehensive interface, which provides valuable data when planning traffic mobility in cities; for example, indicating areas with heavier traffic over a certain time period. Therefore, allowing the use of many different search filters and supporting data delivery in the JSON format, the CitySpeed platform can provide services not supported by popular applications, such as Waze and Google Maps, and potentially assist smart city initiatives in this area. Full article

Today, the uncontrolled urban expansion and ever-increasing rise of construction have caused the need for food, urban greenery, and a healthy environment to be felt more than any other time. On the other hand, population growth and the reduced production of agricultural products and food have jeopardized food security in urban areas, which will endanger the sustainable development of cities. However, the main problem, in which many societies are involved, is how to respond to these needs in a sustainable way. One of the ways of responding to these dilemmas in large cities is the purposeful implementation of urban agriculture. Urban agriculture development, as an important issue, requires the adoption of fundamental and logical policies. In this regard, this research was conducted to evaluate the extent of adherence to urban agriculture in Iran’s eight densely populated cities using a new combined approach of the best–worst method (BWM) and weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS). The results indicated that urban agriculture still has a long way to go and should be considered more seriously. Moreover, vertical farming has been suggested as one of the ways of promoting urban agriculture in the country and smoothing the way to sustainable development. Full article

Damage detection and structural health monitoring have always been of great importance to civil engineers and researchers. Vibration-based damage detection has several advantages compared to traditional methods of non-destructive evaluation, such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) or ultrasonic testing, since they give a global response and are feasible for large structures. Damage detection requires a comparison between two systems states, the baseline or “healthy state”, i.e., the initial modal parameters, and the damaged state. In this study, system identification (SI) was carried out on a pedestrian bridge by measuring the dynamic response using six low-cost triaxial accelerometers. These low-cost accelerometers use a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS), which is cheaper compared to a piezoelectric sensor. The frequency domain decomposition algorithm, which is an output-only method of modal analysis, was used to obtain the modal properties, i.e., natural frequencies and mode shapes. Three mode shapes and frequencies were found out using system identification and were compared with the finite element model (FEM) of the bridge, developed using the commercial finite element software, Abaqus. A good comparison was found between the FEM and SI results. The frequency difference was nearly 10%, and the modal assurance criterion (MAC) of experimental and analytical mode shapes was greater than 0.80, which proved to be a good comparison despite the small number of accelerometers available and the simplifications and idealizations in FEM. Full article

‘Smart cities’ is a concept that embraces many technologies and solutions in sensing and carrying a city’s data through a network for further processing and analysis. Smart cities’ main priority is citizens and environmental sustainability. In practice, wireless sensors networks over mesh networks are the approach employed most of the time. In terms of wireless communications technologies, Bluetooth low energy offers a robust, low cost, and low power consumption option. The recently published Bluetooth mesh profile specification addresses the most relevant challenges on that paradigm, adding secure multicast communications capabilities. A framework to create Smart Cities services was proposed and a traffic light service was used to demonstrate specification applicability for smart cities’ services. The proposed service showed that data may be collected and shared between devices in a mesh network through and over a metropolitan area. The specification’s strengths were demonstrated and some topics for further development were identified. Full article