Spatial modeling issues in future smart cities

Abstract

It is our goal to make today’s and future cities smart, sustainable and resilient. In order to achieve this, it is fundamental to understand how each city works, to formalize the knowledge gained and to apply it to a city model as the base for simulations that can generate future scenarios with a high level of probability. The nature of this model, which must cover design, qualitative and quantitative aspects, has changed over time. In this study, we focus on the role of the spatial dimension and of geometry in a city model. Emerging from being a dominating generative force in ancient cities, spatial modeling has developed into an underlying description language for present and future cities to define functions and properties of the city in space and time. The example of the stocks and flows model applied to the city depicts where and how spatial modeling influences the design, construction and performance of the future Smart City.

Keywords:

• future cities
• spatial modeling
• stocks and flows
• city models
• reality-based 3D models

Acknowledgments

The author wants to thank the team of the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore–ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability. Special thanks to the members of the Simulation Platform. This research is funded by ETH Zürich and by the Singapore National Research Foundation. The publication is supported under the Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program.