The Urban Metaverse describes an immersive 3D environment that connects the physical world of the city and its citizens with its digital data and systems. Physical and digital realities merge, opening up new possibilities for the design and use of the city. This trend study serves as a source of inspiration and guidance for city and community leaders, urban planners, IT professionals, and anyone interested in the future of urban spaces. It helps to understand the opportunities and challenges of the urban metaverse as an evolution of the Smart City and to set the course for sustainable and innovative urban development. To this end, the study analyzes the opportunities that the urban metaverse offers for urban administration and the everyday life of citizens, presents key technologies, and highlights the socio-economic challenges of implementation. The focus is on the potential of the urban metaverse to optimize the planning and operation of urban infrastructures, to promote inclusion and civic participation, and to enhance the innovative capacity of cities and municipalities. The study develops four recommendations for the implementation of metaverse applications in an urban context: 1. user-centered design, 2. ubiquitous accessibility, 3. proactive design of the regulatory framework, and 4. development of viable business models.
Ankit Shetgaonkar, Dipen Pradhan, Lakshit Arora
et al.
The proliferation of IoT in cities, combined with Digital Twins, creates a rich data foundation for Smart Cities aimed at improving urban life and operations. Generative AI (GenAI) significantly enhances this potential, moving beyond traditional AI analytics and predictions by processing multimodal content and generating novel outputs like text and simulations. Using specialized or foundational models, GenAI's natural language abilities such as Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) can power tailored applications and unified interfaces, dramatically lowering barriers for users interacting with complex smart city systems. In this paper, we focus on GenAI applications based on conversational interfaces within the context of three critical user archetypes in a Smart City - Citizens, Operators and Planners. We identify and review GenAI models and techniques that have been proposed or deployed for various urban subsystems in the contexts of these user archetypes. We also consider how GenAI can be built on the existing data foundation of official city records, IoT data streams and Urban Digital Twins. We believe this work represents the first comprehensive summarization of GenAI techniques for Smart Cities from the lens of the critical users in a Smart City.
Cities generate gains from interaction, but citizens often experience segregation as they move around the urban environment. Using GPS location data, we identify four distinct patterns of experienced segregation across US cities. Most common are affluent or poor neighborhoods where visitors lack diversity and residents have limited exposure to diversity elsewhere. Less frequent are majority-minority areas where residents must travel for diverse encounters, and wealthy urban zones with diverse visitors but where locals sort into homogeneous amenities. By clustering areas with similar mobility signatures, we uncover rings around cities and internal pockets where intergroup interaction is limited. Using a decision tree, we show that demography and location interact to create these zones. Our findings, persistent across time and prevalent across US cities, highlight the importance of considering both who is mixing and where in urban environments. Understanding the mesoscopic patterns that define experienced segregation in America illuminates neighborhood advantage and disadvantage, enabling interventions to foster economic opportunity and urban dynamism.
The advancement of 5G technology has transformed various aspects of life, including tourism, by enabling people worldwide to communicate and travel with ease. Traveling to different places and countries is now seamless, removing language barriers and facilitating easy access to information on culture, accommodation, and tourist attractions. Additionally, access to applications that facilitate quicker language translation further enhances the travel experience. Phetchaburi Province holds significant importance as a global tourist destination. UNESCO has recognized Phetchaburi as a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN), comprising one of 49 cities worldwide acknowledged for their creative city initiatives. Phetchaburi Province stands as the 5th city in Thailand to receive this designation. This research investigated 5G performance in Phetchaburi Province, both the inner and outer city, focusing on download and upload speeds. The results indicate that there is widespread 5G coverage throughout Phetchaburi Province, including urban and rural areas, especially for the 5G network with a good performance provided by one of the mobile network operators. In addition, the statistical analysis reveals differences in 5G performances between the inner city and the outer city of Phetchaburi Province, particularly for download speeds (p-value < 0.001).
Metro operation management relies on accurate predictions of passenger flow in the future. This study begins by integrating cross-city (including source and target city) knowledge and developing a short-term passenger flow prediction framework (METcross) for the metro. Firstly, we propose a basic framework for modeling cross-city metro passenger flow prediction from the perspectives of data fusion and transfer learning. Secondly, METcross framework is designed to use both static and dynamic covariates as inputs, including economy and weather, that help characterize station passenger flow features. This framework consists of two steps: pre-training on the source city and fine-tuning on the target city. During pre-training, data from the source city trains the feature extraction and passenger flow prediction models. Fine-tuning on the target city involves using the source city's trained model as the initial parameter and fusing the feature embeddings of both cities to obtain the passenger flow prediction results. Finally, we tested the basic prediction framework and METcross framework on the metro networks of Wuxi and Chongqing to experimentally analyze their efficacy. Results indicate that the METcross framework performs better than the basic framework and can reduce the Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Squared Error by 22.35% and 26.18%, respectively, compared to single-city prediction models.
Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is useful for understanding the dynamics of urban population. Empirically, the population of cities follows a seemingly universal law - called Zipf's law - which was discovered about a century ago and states that when sorted in decreasing order, the population of a city varies as the inverse of its rank. Recent data however showed that this law is only approximate and in some cases not even verified. In addition, the ranks of cities follow a turbulent dynamics: some cities rise while other fall and disappear. Both these aspects - Zipf's law (and deviations around it), and the turbulent dynamics of ranks - need to be explained by the same theoretical framework and it is natural to look for the equation that governs the evolution of urban populations. We will review here the main theoretical attempts based on stochastic equations to describe these empirical facts. We start with the simple Gibrat model that introduces random growth rates, and we will then discuss the Gabaix model that adds friction for allowing the existence of a stationary distribution. Concerning the dynamics of ranks, we will discuss a phenomenological stochastic equation that describes rank variations in many systems - including cities - and displays a noise-induced transition. We then illustrate the importance of exchanges between the constituents of the system with the diffusion with noise equation. We will explicit this in the case of cities where a stochastic equation for populations can be derived from first principles and confirms the crucial importance of inter-urban migrations shocks for explaining the statistics and the dynamics of the population of cities.
Md Abu Sayed, Md Maksudur Rahman, Moinul Islam Zaber
et al.
Analysis of traffic pattern recognition and traffic congestion expansion in real time are one of the exciting and challenging tasks which help the government to build a robust and sustainable traffic management system specially in a densely populated city like Dhaka. In this paper, we analyze the traffic intensity for small areas which are also known as junction points or corridors. We describe Dhaka city traffic expansion from a congestion point by using gravity model. However, we process real-time traffic data of Dhaka city rather than depend on survey and interview. We exactly show that traffic expansion of Dhaka city exactly follows gravity model. Expansion of traffic from a congestion point spreads out rapidly to its neighbor and impact of congested point decreases as the distance increases from that congested point. This analysis will help the government making a planned urbanized Dhaka city in order to reduce traffic jam.
AbstractVarious studies have addressed the issue of privacy and referred to its critical role in shaping the spatial organization and functional configurations of buildings. Residents of public housing projects tend to modify their homes to achieve different functional and occupancy objectives. While the variables that motivate tenants to alter their spatial layouts have been extensively studied, only a few studies have researched the role of privacy as a motivating factor in modifying public housing units upon extended periods of occupancy. Therefore, this study examines the role of privacy as a motivating factor in the spatial layout modification of public housing units in Jordan. It sampled a Jordanian public housing project in which the spatial layout of several housing units has been modified by residents over time. The spatial configuration of the original and the modified version of the housing unit was assessed in terms of visibility, accessibility, hierarchical structure, and the spatial organization of interior spaces. Additionally, face-to-face interviews were conducted with the residents to gain a better understanding of privacy considerations in modified units. The study of Jordanian public housing units revealed that residents carried out various modifications over time that encompassed enclosing balconies with interior living spaces, adding private entrances, or expanding the space of balconies and terraces. The Visibility Graph Analysis (VGA) and J-Graph analyses showed that home modifications precipitated hierarchical spatial relationships that echo established sociocultural traditions in Jordanian society. The data analysis emphasized the key role that privacy plays as a motivational factor for spatial layout transformation. Hence, this research underlines the imperative of integrating sociocultural needs with functional aspects in the process of designing public housing projects. Designers should embed higher levels of flexibility in their masterplans and home layouts. With residents' satisfaction and spatial flexibility in mind, designers should identify and engage concerned stakeholders during the initial stages of planning and design of public housing.
A city is a large human settlement that serves the people who live there, and a smart city is a concept of how cities might better serve their residents through new forms of technology. In this paper, we focus on four major smart city domains according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs: smart utility, smart transportation, smart homes, and smart healthcare. Numerous IoT applications have been developed to achieve the intelligence that we desire in our smart domains, ranging from personal gadgets such as health trackers and smart watches to large-scale industrial IoT systems such as nuclear and energy management systems. However, many of the existing smart city IoT solutions can be made better by considering the suitability of their security strategies. Inappropriate system security designs generally occur in two scenarios: first, system designers recognize the importance of security but are unsure of where, when, or how to implement it; and second, system designers try to fit traditional security designs to meet the smart city security context. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide application designers with the missing security link they may need to improve their security designs. By evaluating the specific context of each smart city domain and the context-specific security requirements, we aim to provide directions on when, where, and how they should implement security strategies and the possible security challenges they need to consider. In addition, we present a new perspective on security issues in smart cities from a data-centric viewpoint by referring to the reference architecture, the Activity-Network-Things (ANT)-centric architecture, built upon the concept of "security in a zero-trust environment". By doing so, we reduce the security risks posed by new system interactions or unanticipated user behaviors while avoiding the hassle of regularly upgrading security models.
Traffic intersections are the most suitable locations for the deployment of computing, communications, and intelligence services for smart cities of the future. The abundance of data to be collected and processed, in combination with privacy and security concerns, motivates the use of the edge-computing paradigm which aligns well with physical intersections in metropolises. This paper focuses on high-bandwidth, low-latency applications, and in that context it describes: (i) system design considerations for smart city intersection intelligence nodes; (ii) key technological components including sensors, networking, edge computing, low latency design, and AI-based intelligence; and (iii) applications such as privacy preservation, cloud-connected vehicles, a real-time "radar-screen", traffic management, and monitoring of pedestrian behavior during pandemics. The results of the experimental studies performed on the COSMOS testbed located in New York City are illustrated. Future challenges in designing human-centered smart city intersections are summarized.
Cities are typical dynamic complex systems that connect people and facilitate interactions. Revealing universal collective patterns behind spatio-temporal interactions between residents is crucial for various urban studies, of which we are still lacking a comprehensive understanding. Massive cellphone data enable us to construct interaction networks based on spatio-temporal co-occurrence of individuals. The rank-size distributions of hourly dynamic population of locations are stable, although people are almost constantly moving in cities and hotspots that attract people are changing over time in a day. A larger city is of a stronger heterogeneity as indicated by a larger scaling exponent. After aggregating spatio-temporal interaction networks over consecutive time windows, we reveal a switching behavior of cities between two states. During the "active" state, the whole city is concentrated in fewer larger communities; while in the "sleeping" state, people are scattered in more smaller communities. Above discoveries are universal over diversified cities across continents. In addition, a city sleeps less, when its population grows larger. And spatio-temporal interaction segregation can be well approximated by residential segregation in smaller cities, but not in larger ones. We propose a temporal-population-weighted-opportunity model by integrating time-dependent departure probability to make dynamic predictions on human mobility, which can reasonably well explain observed patterns of spatio-temporal interactions in cities.
Raymond M. Zayas, Logan E. Beaver, Behdad Chalaki
et al.
The increasing demand for emerging mobility systems with connected and automated vehicles has imposed the necessity for quality testing environments to support their development. In this paper, we introduce a Unity-based virtual simulation environment for emerging mobility systems, called the Information and Decision Science Lab's Scaled Smart Digital City (IDS 3D City), intended to operate alongside its physical peer and its established control framework. By utilizing the Robot Operation System, AirSim, and Unity, we constructed a simulation environment capable of iteratively designing experiments significantly faster than it is possible in a physical testbed. This environment provides an intermediate step to validate the effectiveness of our control algorithms prior to their implementation in the physical testbed. The IDS 3D City also enables us to demonstrate that our control algorithms work independently of the underlying vehicle dynamics, as the vehicle dynamics introduced by AirSim operate at a different scale than our scaled smart city. Finally, we demonstrate the behavior of our digital environment by performing an experiment in both the virtual and physical environments and comparing their outputs.
Oluwashina Madamori, Esther Max-Onakpoya, Gregory D. Erhardt
et al.
Smart city projects aim to enhance the management of city infrastructure by enabling government entities to monitor, control and maintain infrastructure efficiently through the deployment of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices. However, the financial burden associated with smart city projects is a detriment to prospective smart cities. A noteworthy factor that impacts the cost and sustainability of smart city projects is providing cellular Internet connectivity to IoT devices. In response to this problem, this paper explores the use of public transportation network nodes and mules, such as bus-stops as buses, to facilitate connectivity via device-to-device communication in order to reduce cellular connectivity costs within a smart city. The data mules convey non-urgent data from IoT devices to edge computing hardware, where data can be processed or sent to the cloud. Consequently, this paper focuses on edge node placement in smart cities that opportunistically leverage public transit networks for reducing reliance on and thus costs of cellular connectivity. We introduce an algorithm that selects a set of edge nodes that provides maximal sensor coverage and explore another that selects a set of edge nodes that provide minimal delivery delay within a budget. The algorithms are evaluated for two public transit network data-sets:Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Louisville, Kentucky. Results show that our algorithms consistently outperform edge node placement strategies that rely on traditional centrality metrics(betweenness and in-degree centrality) by over 77% reduction in coverage budget and over 20 minutes reduction in latency.
Smart Cities, with their problems and challenges, is an emerging smart paradigm. To achieve better quality and usability levels, we need engineering solutions to support smart cities' soft-layer development. Statics, dynamics and generative semantics are involved, but segregating Coordination Protocols from the other semantics could act as a complexity management strategy to tackle the inherent complexity of smart city systems. Here we demonstrate how we could engineer the protocols layer of a smart city by using a Reo-Based solution.
The systems that operate the infrastructure of cities have evolved in a fragmented fashion across several generations of technology, causing city utilities and services to operate sub-optimally and limiting the creation of new value-added services and restrict opportunities for cost-saving. The integration of cross-domain city data offers a new wave of opportunities to mitigate some of these impacts and enables city systems to draw effectively on interoperable data that will be used to deliver smarter cities. Despite the considerable potential of city data, current smart cities initiatives have mainly addressed the problem of data management from a technology perspective, and have disregarded stakeholders and data needs. As a consequence, such initiatives are susceptible to failure from inadequate stakeholder input, requirements neglecting, and information fragmentation and overload. They are also likely to be limited in terms of both scalability and future proofing against technological, commercial and legislative change. This paper proposes a systematic business-modeldriven framework to guide the design of large and highly interconnected data infrastructures which are provided and supported by multiple stakeholders. The framework is used to model, elicit and reason about the requirements of the service, technology, organization, value, and governance aspects of smart cities. The requirements serve as an input to a closed-loop supply chain model, which is designed and managed to explicitly consider the activities and processes that enables the stakeholders of smart cities to efficiently leverage their collective knowledge. We demonstrate how our approach can be used to design data infrastructures by examining a series of exemplary scenarios and by demonstrating how our approach handles the holistic design of a data infrastructure and informs the decision making process.
Jean-Sébastien Dessureault, Jonathan Simard, Daniel Massicotte
This paper concerns the challenge to evaluate and predict a district vitality index (VI) over the years. There is no standard method to do it, and it is even more complicated to do it retroactively in the last decades. Although, it is essential to evaluate and learn features of the past to predict a VI in the future. This paper proposes a method to evaluate such a VI, based on a k-mean clustering algorithm. The meta parameters of this unsupervised machine learning technique are optimized by a genetic algorithm method. Based on the resulting clusters and VI, a linear regression is applied to predict the VI of each district of a city. The weights of each feature used in the clustering are calculated using a random forest regressor algorithm. This method can be a powerful insight for urbanists and inspire the redaction of a city plan in the smart city context.
This document introduces the background and the usage of the Hyperspectral City Dataset and the benchmark. The documentation first starts with the background and motivation of the dataset. Follow it, we briefly describe the method of collecting the dataset and the processing method from raw dataset to the final release dataset, specifically, the version 1.0. We also provide the detailed usage of the dataset and the evaluation metric for submitted the result for the 2019 Hyperspectral City Challenge.
What did it feel like to walk through a city from the past? In this work, we describe Nostalgin (Nostalgia Engine), a method that can faithfully reconstruct cities from historical images. Unlike existing work in city reconstruction, we focus on the task of reconstructing 3D cities from historical images. Working with historical image data is substantially more difficult, as there are significantly fewer buildings available and the details of the camera parameters which captured the images are unknown. Nostalgin can generate a city model even if there is only a single image per facade, regardless of viewpoint or occlusions. To achieve this, our novel architecture combines image segmentation, rectification, and inpainting. We motivate our design decisions with experimental analysis of individual components of our pipeline, and show that we can improve on baselines in both speed and visual realism. We demonstrate the efficacy of our pipeline by recreating two 1940s Manhattan city blocks. We aim to deploy Nostalgin as an open source platform where users can generate immersive historical experiences from their own photos.
This article is about creative cities and their largely invisible and largely neglected workforce, the ‘ordinary people’ who provide the work- and life-place services upon which creative workers depend. The article considers the nature of creative cities, their labour markets and the precarious nature of much employment within them. The ambiguous relationship between different employment groups within the creative city is illustrated. The analysis forms the basis for reaching conclusions and helping to formulate advice for policy makers in developing approaches that are inclusive and accessible. The article is set against and acknowledges the importance of the rising tide of populism as a real challenge to an elitist mainstream creative city discourse.
Authoring realistic behaviors to populate a large virtual city can be a cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone task. Believable crowds require the effort of storytellers and programming experts working together for long periods of time. In this work, we present a new framework to allow users to generate populated environments in an easier and faster way, by relying on the use of procedural techniques. Our framework consists of the procedural generation of semantically-augmented virtual cities to drive the procedural generation and simulation of crowds. The main novelty lies in the generation of agendas for each individual inhabitant (alone or as part of a family) by using a rule-based grammar that combines city semantics with the autonomous persons' characteristics. Real-world data can be used to accommodate the generation of a virtual population, thus enabling the recreation of more realistic scenarios. Users can author a new population or city by editing rule files with the flexibility of re-using, combining or extending the rules of previous populations. The results show how logical and consistent behaviors can be easily generated for a large crowd providing a good starting point to bring virtual cities to life.