The Blue City Project
For the Blue City project, researchers combine artificial intelligence, architecture, urban planning, engineering, and environmental science into a comprehensive analysis and model of the flows and infrastructures that affect our urban environment. These flows range from waste, utilities and biodiversity to transportation of people, goods, and materials. The integration of these urban dimensions into a cohesive, open-source platform is the starting point for analysing emergent patterns leading to more informed and proactive planning decisions.
The integrated platform will enable: (1) the detection of correlations and evidence for causalities across flow categories over time and space; (2) seeing emerging patterns that are not obvious to discern with traditional analytical tools; (3) testing intervention hypotheses and predict scenarios; and (4) deploying engineering and artificial intelligence tools for planning a more resilient city.
The city of Lausanne is acting as a partner and living laboratory for this project. Its prototypical, generalizable characteristics as typical, mid-sized Swiss city that acts as a transportation hub to the region and that contains a wide variety of historical and modern urban spaces, along with the accessibility to stakeholders and a variety of datasets, makes Lausanne an ideal case study destination.
The Chair of Ecological Systems Design is involved in the flows of people (human mobility) and waste. For human mobility, we are quantifying urban form at high spatial resolution across multiple dimensions of interest and connecting this digital representation of the built environment to observed behaviour and demand of urban mobility. This will inform an assessment of different archetypes of urban form and urban design and their contributions to energy and emission reductions in the transportation sector. It will also assist Transport Lausanne (TL), one of the project’s partners, to understand current demand patterns and inform their integrated approach to planning future service infrastructures.
This project has been funded by external page InnoSwiss.