Where there was only desert sand five years ago, there are now around 400 structures on the Expo site in Dubai – country pavilions, restaurants, information kiosks, offices. The world exhibition will take place until March 2022. Thereafter, four out of five buildings will be converted into the model city “District 2020”, in which 145,000 people will live. There is a so-called digital twin for every building. In other words, a virtual replica that is fed with data from the buildings in real time via measuring stations, sensors and drones. There, those responsible for operation and maintenance observe the consumption of energy and water, temperature and air values and can thus optimize the performance of the technical systems and reduce energy consumption.
In such a comprehensive way, only about five percent of the existing buildings worldwide are intelligent, says Thomas Kiessling, chief technologist of the Siemens Smart Infrastructure division. The German industrial group developed and built the building technology, the digital infrastructure and the communicative networking of District 2020.
According to the current status report from UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program, 37 percent of global CO₂-Emissions to the account of the construction and building industry. According to experts like Kiessling, around 40 percent of this relates to the operation of buildings. It pays to make cities more sustainable with the help of smart building technology.
In the meantime, however, there are not only completely digitized buildings, but entire networked settlements, so-called smart cities. Its proponents want to get the ecological problems of modern cities under control by means of digital control. The goal: better traffic management and less environmental pollution up to climate neutrality.
Panasonic will present its third model city near Osaka in 2022
Toyota is currently building “Woven City” at the foot of Mount Fuji, a laboratory city for researchers and employees of the company, in which people, buildings and vehicles are connected to one another in a fully networked system. Data, electricity and water, but also hydrogen, flow underground. Because the settlement for around 2000 residents gets its energy not only from solar power plants, but also from fuel cells. So should CO₂-Neutrality can be achieved not only in everyday mobility, but in the entire life of the residents and in the urban infrastructure.
Panasonic was the pioneer of such smart cities. The company will present its third model city near Osaka in 2022. Together with residents and partner companies, the group is investigating the application of new digital technologies in real environments in its laboratory towns. The first, Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town, went into operation in 2014 – a suburban settlement with networked solar systems, water-saving household appliances, but also extensive surveillance using video cameras.
In the smart Future Living Berlin development, energy is produced locally from renewable sources. Panasonic contributed the photovoltaics on the roofs and the battery storage. The new district was designed in such a way that 90 households almost CO₂-can live freely. And enjoy the most modern living comfort: There is a parcel station for courier services, a washing center, the apartment, elevator and underground car park can be opened via app. There are five electric Smarts available at their charging stations for use in the neighborhood’s own car-sharing system. By using the offers, the residents provide data that shows the partner companies which products will be important tomorrow.
“I live in the future,” says Future Living tenant Stefan Schwunk. Thanks to digitalization, everything in his loft can be controlled by voice command and the app: lights and shutters, the television, the music boxes, the coffee machine and the stove.
“I wouldn’t call it a city,” says the researcher
But not everyone would feel comfortable in such a smart home, let alone in a smart city. According to a survey by Magenta Telekom, existing fears relate to data protection, a possible dependence on technologies, the acceleration of everyday life, social distancing and, especially among the older respondents, to failing due to digitization.
While mayors primarily hope for solutions to specific problems such as traffic, energy or urban sprawl through the use of digitization and networking, the citizens see the issue more holistically. They simply expect a better quality of life from smart cities.
This is exactly what the Toyota and Panasonic laboratory cities promise: flowing traffic, clean air, less noise, more greenery. But is that enough?
“I wouldn’t call it a city,” says Tatjana Schneider, urban researcher and head of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and the City at the TU Braunschweig. “For me, the city is a place where many people and cultures come together that would otherwise not meet.” At the moment, technology does not manage to reproduce these chance encounters.
The Danish city planner Jan Gehl sees it similarly. He is interested in why people like to be in certain places, whether they sit on a park bench and why not. “Every city can have people walking around – for example, if the distance from the train station to the university is great. A good city will have a lot of people who don’t walk around. Because they enjoy the environment.”
As a first step in consulting projects, he therefore tries to find out how many places there are in a city that you can sit in without having to pay for them. How many public benches are there? Where would they best be placed? “Then I’ll put up a lot of new benches,” says Gehl. What you invite, you get that too. “If you invite cars, you get more traffic, and if you invite pedestrians, you get more pedestrians and urban life.”
In cities, streets take up up to 30 percent of the space, that is 60 to 80 percent of the public space. Around 18 percent of global CO₂-Emissions come from cars.
The city planners of Copenhagen began to consider early on whether it would be good to deal with space that way, or whether there weren’t any ways to do it better. Bicycles and pedestrians have been given priority here for many years. Bicycle lanes were laid out, pedestrian zones were designated, parks and paths were intertwined. Copenhagen should be climate neutral by 2025.
“Cities have to become part of the natural cycle or we will destroy everything.”
Vicente Guallart, former chief architect of Barcelona, goes one step further. He demands: “Cities will have to have CO in the future₂ absorb instead of emitting it. “The basis for this are houses like trees, cities like forests. Guallart means this literally, wood is the building material of the hour for him. The raw material grows again and stores CO₂. A forest, on the other hand, only uses natural resources such as solar energy. For Guallart it is the epitome of an intact cycle: if you leave nature to its own devices, a forest is created because the forest has the ability to reproduce itself. “Cities have to become part of the natural cycle or we will destroy everything,” he warns.
In the hills above Barcelona, Guallart at the Institute of Advanced Architecture is thinking about emission-free buildings, agriculture and self-sufficiency in urban centers. Because according to the principle of a continuous urban circular economy that he propagated, food must in future also be grown in the city instead of being transported halfway around the world.
The Spanish architect is currently planning a settlement with integrated farm landscapes for Xiong’an, a new eco-city 120 kilometers south of Beijing. On the roof, solar modules provide almost 50 percent of the electricity for the buildings over the year. In greenhouses operated all year round with LED light, 40 percent of the amount of fruit and vegetables required for the 3,000 residents is also produced on the roof.
Fast internet in the apartments and corresponding floor plans make it possible to work in the home office. On the ground floor of the building, residents can use 3-D printers to produce everyday items. Organic waste ends up in the greenhouses as compost, plastic is reused for 3-D printing. The concept combines waste recycling, food and energy production under one roof.
Are people being pushed into the background again?
The computer-designed model projects Xiong’an as well as Toyota’s Woven City and “District 2020” are based on the model of a city of short distances, in which people can reach most destinations on foot or by bike. But this approach is currently also the goal of many urban planners for the grown cities of Europe. In Barcelona, for example, 30 percent of the population already walk to work. In Copenhagen and Oslo, cars were gradually banned from the city center. Around 650 kilometers of new cycle paths are to be added in Paris by 2024.
For Tatjana Schneider, a livable city means “that children can play on the streets, that there is a lot of greenery, that the inner cities are no longer just geared towards consumption, that places that are more oriented towards the common good are planned.”
With digitalization, there is a risk that after the car-friendly city with the Smart City, a technology-driven model will once again push the human living environment into the background. It would be important to bring the human scale back into focus. Jan Gehl put it aptly in his book “Cities for People”: We will still be the same size tomorrow, we will be able to run the same fast and far and be able to look just as far.