Transitions Towards Smart Sustainable Cities. Project examples, ICT, Stakeholders, Climate Action Guest lecture in NTNU AAR4821 – Sustainable Facilities Management. 20210922

1. Transitions Towards Smart Sustainable
Cities
Project examples, ICT, Stakeholders, Climate Action
Guest lecture in AAR4821 – Sustainable Facilities
Management
Dirk Ahlers
Smart Sustainable Cities Group, Department of
Architecture and Planning, NTNU
https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/dirk.ahlers
https://www.ntnu.edu/smartcities

2. 2
What is a Smart City?
• Technology?
• ICT?
• Data?
• Smarter Planning?
• Smarter Operation?
• Smarter Organization?
• Smarter People?

3. 3
UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development
[http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/
http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/goal-11-
sustainable-cities-and-communities.html]

4. 4
Background

5. 5
Smart City Evolution
City Evolution, City Systems Evolution
Technological
constraints
and
opportunities
City needs
and strategy
External and
internal
constraints,
options,
changes
[adapted from ITU-T, Setting the framework for an ICT architecture of a smart sustainable city (SSC-0345), 2015]
System & Architecture
Evolution and
Adaptation,
Development and
Maintenance
Urban Renewal, City
Development, City
Redevelopment, Urban
Innovation
Smart City Co-Evolution
City ICT

6. 6
Smart City Stakeholders, context,
partnerships
Smart City
Company
1
Real
Estate
Company
4
Company
...
Academia
Municipality
National
Actors
City
networks
European
Actors
Company
3
Citizens
Technological solutions do
not operate in a vacuum. Civil
Society

7. 7
Quadruple Helix Innovation Model
• Method used in Innovation,
Urban Planning/Development,
Citizen engagement
• Co-Creation and Open
Innovation
• Involvement and collaboration
of relevant actors
• Structural changes beyond
any one segment
• Smart city means involvement
of all stakeholders in urban
innovation, knowledge
sharing, collaboration
Participatory
Innovation
Industry
Academia
Civil Society
Government
[EU Digital Single Market: Open Innovation2.0 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/open-innovation-20]

8. 8
Connection

9. 9
Facility Management & ICT
• Sustainability
• ‘Green’ buildings
• Climate mitigation and
adaptation
• (Urban Planning)
ICT &
Technology
Facility
Management &
Real Estate
Development
• ICT as an enabler
• Strategy & Smartness &
Data
• Urban (big) data
• Integration into urban
networks
• Data-driven society

10. 10
Scales of study
Smart
Home
Smart
Building
Smart
Campus
Smart
Neighbor-
hood
Smart City
Smart
Nation
Building
Systems
Building
Integration,
Cohesion
Infrastructure,
Networks,
Community
City Systems,
Distribution,
Organization,
Politics,
Citizens
Large-scale
integration of
everything,
government,
???
Private
systems

11. 11
[http://trondheim2030.no/2015/11/09/ny-tredimensjonal-modell-av-trondheim-gjor-det-
enklere-a-planlegge-framtidas-by/]

12. 12
Building Lifecycle
Planning &
Design
Construction Operation Teardown
• Here: focus on planning, maintenance and operations
• Use, operation, maintenance, repair, cleaning, logistics,
modernisation, adaptation, transformation

13. 13
Examples

14. 14
What we do
• Smart City development and research projects
• Interdisciplinary, spanning multiple departments and faculties
• Labs, workshops, equipment, testbeds, networks, living labs
• Support for projects, prototyping, students, theses, …
• Work in the context of
– Smart Cities
– Urban Computing
– Mobility Analysis
– Smart Mobility
– Visual Analytics
– Campus Analytics

15. 15
Examples
• +CityxChange – Smart Cities & Communities Lighthouse project
• Campus mobility
• Outdoor/indoor air quality
• Smart Hospitals (EBIM), logistics and optimization
• ZEB
• ZEN
• Smart Grids, Smart Metering, Smart Charging, energy use
• Internet of Things/Everything
• Big Data and Machine Learning
• Smart Parking, MaaS, smart transport planning, green transportation
• Water, waste, utilities, building stock measurements

16. 16
Example: Campus Guide: MazeMap
• Startup out of a Common project between Trådløse
Trondheim A/S, Information department NTNU,
Studieavdelingen, NTNU IT, NTNU Videre and IME NTNU
• Cisco WLAN-positioning on Campus and in the City
[http://mazemap.com/]

17. 17
“Campus Analytics”
• Range of applications on WiFi network
– WLAN indoor coverage on campus
• ‘Campus Analytics’
– Mobility data with high spatial and temporal
resolution
– Passive location sensing
– Device positions as proxy for people’s
locations
– Abstraction and processing layers
• Data cleaning/preprocessing
• Movement Extraction
• Building-graph extraction
• Visualization
[Visualizing a City Within a City — Mapping Mobility Within a University Campus. Dirk Ahlers, Kristoffer Aulie,
Jeppe Eriksen, and John Krogstie. Conference on Big Data and Analytics for Smart Cities. 2016.]

18. 18
Estimates are useful
[A mobile service using anonymous location-based data: finding reading rooms. Shang Gao, John Krogstie,
Trond Thingstad, Hoang Tran. International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, 32(1). 2015.]

19. 19
Applications
• Awareness and planning
support of building use
• Real-time availability of
rooms and facilities
• Connection to larger
mobility
• Bottlenecks
• Sustainable campus
• Scaling out
• Applications
• Sort of lab: Self-contained
campus is functionally
closed

20. 20
CTT – Carbon Track and Trace: IoT emission sensor network
https://www.ntnu.edu/ad/ctt

21. 21

22. 22
Example: smart hospital
[Johan van der Zwart, Healthcare architecture research]

23. Limerick · Trondheim · Alba Iulia · Písek · Sestao · Smolyan · Võru
+CityxChange
SCC1 Lighthouse Project for the
Development of Positive Energy Blocks
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 824260.
http://cityxchange.eu/

25. City-Driven System Transition to
Positive Energy Blocks & Districts

26. 26
Enterprise Architecture – Making sense of
distributed systems and ecosystems

27. Powerhouse Brattøra
Trondheim
[www.powerhouse.no]
Gardens International,
Limerick
[www.limerick.ie]
Calle Txabarri, Sestao
[www.sestaoberri.eus]
Lysgården, Sluppen,
Trondheim
[www.lysgarden.no]
Starting from hubs: Anchor buildings

28. Structure for urban
innovation spaces
• Activate the innovation potential &
innovation ecosystem of a city
• City as a living lab
• Innovation Playgrounds
• Innovation Labs & Citizen
Observatories
• Physical & virtual
• City & Areas & Labs
Example: Trondheim

29. Real estate ownership & Partnerships
Example: Trondheim Example: Limerick

30. Citizen Participation Processes –
Include broader knowledge

31. Bold City Vision Framework
City Strategy Transitions
[D3.1 Framework for Bold City Vision, Guidelines, and Incentive Schemes,
https://cityxchange.eu/knowledge-base/framework-for-bold-city-vision-guidelines-and-incentive-
schemes/ ]

32. 32
What next?

33. 33
Known problem. Time is running out.
We need radical fast change from business as
usual!
[IPCC Report, Climate Change 2021, Summary for Policymakers, IPCC AR6 WGI, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ ]
[https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/]

34. 34
How it can be solved is clear; the difficulty is to persuade
the human race to acquiesce in its own survival.
I cannot believe that this task is impossible.
Bertrand Russell: "The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War", Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, October 1946.

35. 35
Action? Action!
Societal
Action
Individual
Action
Systemic
Action

36. 36
Covid-19 brings a new focus on livability
Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City, Street Seating (50076249568), CC BY 2.0
Fabian Deter, Pop-up Radweg auf dem Kottbusser Damm in Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0

37. 37
Takeaways
• Smart City is a multi-stakeholder transition process
• Make cities more livable, sustainable, understandable
• ICT is one (part of the) solution
• Address the climate crisis, make radical change
• “Do cool stuff that matters”
Smart Cities,
Sustainability,
Climate Action

38. 38
Q&A
Contact
Dirk Ahlers
search://Dirk Ahlers
@dirkahlers
dirk.ahlers@ntnu.no
https://www.ntnu.edu/smartcities
https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/dirk.ahlers
+CityxChange
Twitter: @plusCities
Web: cityxchange.eu
KB: cityxchange.eu/knowledge-base/