Next Generation Smart Cities - the Role of Geomatics

More than half of the global population lives in urban areas. This will increase to 70% by 2050. Urban growth is most rapid in the developing world, where cities gain an average of five million residents every month. As cities grow in size and population, harmony among the spatial, social and environmental aspects of a city and between their inhabitants becomes of paramount importance. This harmony depends on several cornerstones: sustainability, wealth and justice. Since a number of years the issue of “Smart” Cities is being used both as buzzword and technical term to indicate the urgent need of change in the development and management of cities. In this context the “Spatial intelligence” of cities plays an important role. It refers to informational and cognitive processes, such as information collection and processing, real-time alert, forecasting, learning, collective intelligence, distributed problem solving, which characterize "intelligent" or "smart" cities. Here Geomatics technologies and know-how become crucial elements in developing such concepts and maintaining them over long periods of time. Geomatics is understood as the unity of Geodesy, Surveying, Photogrammetry/Remote Sensing, Spatial Information Systems, Visualization/Cartography. This paper, after a brief definition of the smart city concept, will describe to what extent Geomatics technologies can contribute to the realization and advancements of smart cities. As example and test-bed we will use the currently active SEC-FCL project (Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability Future Cities Laboratory). This project has nine research streams (modules): Urban Sociology, Low Exergy, Landscape & Ecology, Digital Fabrication, Transforming and Mining Urban Stocks, Territorial Organization, Mobility and Transportation Infrastructure, Urban Design Strategies, and Simulation Platform. The Simulation Platform is the place where Geomatics and other data for all the other modules are being generated, analyzed and simulated. A new installation, the Value Asia Lab, serves as interface for interactive visualizations and simulations. Among the many Geomatics technologies our paper will focus on 3D city modeling. With projects in Punggol and Little India, both districts of Singapore, we will show how high-resolution stereo satellite images are used in city modeling. The major part will deal with the derivation of a very high resolution model of the NUS (National University of Singapore) campus from 5 cm footprint aerial UAV images, Mobile Mapping System laser-scan point clouds and terrestrial images. This is a very complex problem to be solved. We show work in progress.