 Welcome everybody to our interview talk with today's topic, smart city, intelligent urban planning is digital. Feel free to participate and ask your questions in the chat. This is very important that you really interact with us, that you join us and we will cover your questions and at the end with the expert and they will answer them later. So, let me introduce myself. I'm Denise Wenzel. You might know me from the Intergeo Expo and conferences where I am my team. We are from Team Intergeo Communication and Marketing and we are very pleased that you join us today on this very hot Friday afternoon. So, I'm delighted to have also these three experts with me who are each passionate about urban digitization in urban planning in their own fields. So, before I introduce the speakers, I would like to introduce the topic with a few words. We live in the century of cities. The influx into metropolises continues worldwide. Climate change is accompanied by the need to massively reduce climate relevant carbon dioxide emissions. The influx of people into cities poses a major challenge for urban planning. The tasks for city administrations are becoming increasingly complex and tools and methods are often still based on traditional static approaches and involve only a limited number of citizens and stakeholders in relevant positions. So, let's talk about digital and intelligent smart city planning with these experts. Please welcome Professor Dr. Geser Zimmer from the Hafen City University Hamburg. Welcome. We can right now see you on the screen. Please also welcome Professor Dr. Volker Koss from the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences. Very warm welcome and Dr. Gerhard Schrötter from the city of Zurich in Switzerland. Perfect. We can all see you right now. So, first of all, we start with three individual talks and move into the discussion in the last quarter of the talk. And please, once again, to all our participants today, feel free to ask your questions in the chat. We will cover them at the end and the experts will of course answer them later. So, first of all, we start with Zurich and Dr. Gerhard Schrötter. Perfect. Very welcome. He is the director of Geometrics and Surveying at the City of Zurich. In Zurich, he focuses on digital, transparent urban planning and development with the help of a three-dimensional digital twin of the city. Wow, we can see right now the digital twin perfect. And his statement is to meet the demands of urban planning today and tomorrow. We need the digital and, as he calls it, responsive city. So, Dr. Gerhard Schrötter or Gary, we read that word below your video. Yeah, we are curious about the digital approaches in the city of Zurich and we are very curious right now to get to know your approach. Please start with your introduction. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. I'm very happy to present the digital twin of the city of Zurich. My name is normally Gerhard Schrötter, but since I moved to Switzerland, I'm Gary, so in Switzerland normally you were called Gary or a cute version. So that's the reason I'm called Gary Schrötter in Switzerland. I just, I want to talk about the digital twin. And for me, this first picture or this first image is very, very important because we see here a point cloud. We see a point cloud of the city of Zurich and we see not only the train station, how it looks like from above, but of course, we also see the underground. So for me, that's the key point in a digital twin. We have to focus for urban planning, not only on the above ground, but also on the underground, which is a very, very important aspect too. We use here a point cloud visualization because for us, it's a possibility to show in a transparent way what is above and what is underground that combine this together into a digital twin. Later on, I will give some short views about what a digital twin is, but now I just want to go on to this picture, this picture we have since I think 20 or 30 years in the field of geomatics and it's all about physical space and digital space. And the digital twin helps to bring the physical world, so the world we are living in into the digital world where we can ask certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of what if questions. And I think the digital twin like it was before the 3D city model, which of course still exists, is very important for the what if questions and the digital twin is the key for simulations. So if we see something in physical space and we want to do simulations and we want to bring that information from the digital space back in the physical space again. And for me, that circle normally is an infinite design because it never ends. If we build something in the urban space, we have to digitize it again and see how we can make it better and bring it back into the physical space. For the digital twin itself, for the definition that circle gets faster and faster. So we will have sensors that will bring in, I never call it real time data, always call it just in time data because for me it's important to understand if there is a certain kind of question, we have to answer that question with just in time data. It doesn't help to always have every month a new 3D city model, new buildings. It helps just to bring certain kind of information in just in time into the digital space where we can do the analysis. There are just one application I want to show it today. It's a very, very hot day. I think we have 30 degrees here in Zurich and there are two beautiful publications. One publication is from the city of Zurich. It's called Falkland & Hitzem in the room. It's all about an action plan, how to cool down the city, how to cool down different hotspots that have been figured out in the city. And there is another beautiful publication outside of the city of Zurich, which is a reflection of the publication of the city of Zurich for architects. So on the one hand, we have about 200 pages of packed information and digital twin scenarios. And on the other hand, we have a reflection from outside from Hochberder for architects to make it better understandable for the public. Normally, I would show a movie now and I will try to show some sequences of that movie. I hope you can see that. I just want to give some short snapshots of that movie and explain again the physically and the digital space and the scenarios we are working in the digital space. And the video will be done on my Twitter account, so you can also download that video and take a look. It's about two and a half minutes. And we have figured out about 13 different test areas in Zurich, public spaces. That's the so-called Bullinger Bloods in Zurich. And that space is about 4,200 square meters and it's like a floor heating system. Because inside of that space, of course, you have a very small water fountain, but outside there are not much trees, not much vegetation. And of course there are cars, but it should be a place where people meet and people exchange ideas or information. And I just want to show that it's important then to bring that space. This is just an example here inside of the digital world, like I showed before. We're using different sensor data. We're using data from Airborne LiDAR. We're using data from mobile mapping from streets. We have done a campaign for the 700 kilometer street space and public space in the city of Zurich with mobile mapping. We're making a fusion of that. And for us, it's very important to have a certain kind, to have an attractive visualization of that so we can talk about it. So it's not a visualization, but you have to be a real expert to talk about it. So in a visualization where different stakeholders can take part. For us, it's also very important, like I said before, for the integral planning to also have a representation of the underground. And if you want to plan a tree in the city of Zurich, it's a huge project because a tree itself, for example, to cool down that space needs a lot of space in the underground. And also for the so-called sponge city or sponge place or sponge street concept, you need to have a bigger space in the underground so the water can be there and can be used when it is a whole day like today. And then you see here, for example, we have for the whole city of Zurich a utility map. We have a 3D utility map for different projects and we visualize that. And then we look, for example, that's the situation at the moment. It's a so-called PET at 2pm. Then we do a certain kind of simulation, which I showed before. There are certain kinds of action plans, which have been introduced, what I introduced in the FAP-Plano-Hitze-Minderung before in that publication. And we try that different scenarios in digital space. For example, like here. So we are trying to plant certain kind of trees there. Try to figure out if those trees have any kind of interference with the underground, so with different pipelines, is it possible or not. And out of that we have a good discussion base to move on in the collaboration in the city of Zurich. As I said before, this is just now a visualization, but we found out that if we do it in that way and if we do that simulation and scenarios in digital space and bring it back to reality. It's very important to have a close to reality image again so we can talk with different stakeholders about that. As I said before, that will be published on my Twitter account. And I just have a few more seconds left. I just want to give a small, it's like a meta, meta document about different publications I made and different projects I'm working in. One is the digital twin of the city of Zurich for urban planning. There are a lot of applications there, which are shown. Then I'm working for a Singapore EDH Center for the digital underground of Singapore, which is a close cooperation with the city of Zurich. And as I said before, all that information and links and also the information about what that movie can be downloaded on my Twitter account. Perfect. Thank you very much, Gary, for these impressions of the city of Zurich and your digital twin model. So I would like to start with the first question. So as we just could see, the digital twin is at the center of a smart city strategy for you. So what is the digital twin in your definition? And what does it achieve? And so also, where is the difference to the 3D city model? For that question, I would like to share my screen again if that is possible. Just prepared, small. Can you see it now? Yes. We have discussed a lot about what's the difference between a 3D city model and the digital twin for the city of Zurich. And we came out, as I said before, it's always different. So if you talk about smart cities, you always have to adopt it for different cities. So that definition is for the city of Zurich, but maybe it can be adopted for other cities too. But it's just for us to have a clear mind what's the difference between a 3D city model and a digital twin. And what you can see here, that blue part here in that graph or in that image, that's the digital twin of the city of Zurich. And it consists of building information data and it consists of 3D geodata. And this is very much different to other definitions because we are just focusing on the data part. We are not focusing on any kind of platforms. We are focusing just on the data part and we want to find out for the data what is the digital twin. So the digital twin is building information data plus 3D geodata. This 3D city model itself, what is in what is now a description is a model for the whole city. So if you have, for example, the utility map, if you have buildings, if you have trees, and if this is consistent for the whole city, we call it 3D city model. But if you do a certain kind of project where we have different sensors involved, where we have different 3D information, which is not fully available for the whole city of Zurich, we call it then the digital twin. So for us, it's really a fusion between the GIS world and the building information world. And what is also very important, that fusion reflects in our organization. So in our organization, we have the so-called IS city of Zurich, GIS city of Zurich, and this world will be now fused together with the building information modeling world. So the organization will be like that, that there will be one steering board that is responsible for the GIS and the BIM development with different strategies. And that's for us somehow demand to go between 3D city model and digital service. Okay. Thank you. And you put the 3D model online. Is that correct? So you represent a clear open government strategy in Zurich and are there also applications that have been created by third parties who helped or were at it? Maybe just one application. There are many, many applications. There is one game, for example, which is very popular. It's called reformat set. It's a game about how Zurich looks in the future. And that game is great because it uses the footprint that it also uses the 3D buildings of the city of Zurich and introduced it into the world of gaming. There's also another application related to birdly, birdly is a way of understanding. It's like you can fly really physically with a certain kind of instrument. Yeah, I tested that at Intergeo 2019 in Stuttgart. I flew with a birdly over Zurich. That's also integrated there and just one application. There are so many different applications. So if you look at the publications I've shown before, there are many, many architects working on this 3D information for planning the city of Zurich. But this is a very nice application because it shows the travel of time. So I will also share those documents. It always links to certain kinds of websites. But here what you can see from 1850 to now it's a little bit longer to 2019. I believe you can see the development of the city of Zurich over time. So there is a time shift here. And then you see how the buildings, how the city grew or which areas of the city grew. And that's a beautiful application. It's done by people in the open data community. And there will be also a link in the document from many, many different other applications related to the 3D city model. And one thing is very important if you look at all our data sets of the city of Zurich for open data, about two sets of data sets that are downloaded at geodata. And one search that is downloaded is 3D data. So I think the demand for 3D data, so one third of all downloads on the geodata for the city of Zurich is related to 3D information. Thank you very much, Gary. That was very good oversight and very exciting pictures here of the 3D model. And it looks like kind of a gamification, which is always very interesting. And right now I would like to head over. Gary, we will talk later, but first of all, we go to Professor Dr. Gesar Zima. Gesar Zima heads the City Science Lab at Hafen City University, a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MAUSA, that researches the future of cities. And the City Science Lab at HCU researches the transformation of cities in the context of digitalization with partners from civil society, politics, business and academia. She is also the scientific director of the Unitak Hamburg Technology and Innovation Lab for the United Nations, which focuses on the use of data in informal settlements. And her statement or lecture today is about sustainable urban planning is only possible with citizen participation. I think most of us agree. So please, Professor Gesar Zima, we look forward to your impulse and very welcome. Thank you very much for this kind introduction and thanks for inviting me. I'm very delighted to be part of this panel also to meet all the colleagues. And I was very happy to hear about the digital twin in Zurich. We are also setting up a digital twin in Hamburg, so we should definitely connect Gary. But I don't speak so much about the twin now here. I come a bit from a different angle. Yeah, my title here is collaboration. So what we do actually is that we build tools, different tools, we call them city scopes that enable people in the city different stakeholders to speak with each other and to work with each other. So we are trying to foster a collaboration with data. So all our tools are data based. We map a lot and I will show you a little bit what we do in Hamburg. I don't go so much into details and because we don't have so much time, it's more an overview. And then like you said at the beginning, I would also bring in a little bit the global perspective because I work for the United Nations and there we work with big, big cities in the global south. And we also have a lot of data challenges when we come to those cities. So I'm having actually two labs. I'm a lab person. One is the city science lab. It's a cooperation with MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. And this is a very typical situation in my daily work. We have this, we call them city scopes. So they are interactive tables. You can do scenario planning like Gary also said this, what if this is also a question that we ask ourselves very often at work. What happens if we talk all private cars from the city centers? What happened if whatever we build more bike lanes and so on and so on. And in our case, those tools are interactive. We also work with analog material like legal breaks or other material so that people who come to our lab really have to work on this maps and on this tables. And it's GIS based, of course, actually it's about mapping. And we always try to enable collaboration between citizens. So we really organize citizen engagement processes. So really citizens come to our lab and work with us, but also stakeholder engagement. We work a lot with experts, urban planners. And of course we also try to connect science and industry to the dialogue of planning the city for the future. I give you a very brief example. The first big project we did was Finding Places, which was quite interesting. Four or five years ago you all remember that so many refugees came to Europe, also to Hamburg. We took approximately 40,000. And it was not so much the number of people who came, it was more the speed because they came very, very fast. The city administration had to put all those people in tents because we didn't have empty spaces. And I would never forget that image. So the whole city was full of tents and people had to stay there, had to sleep there. And the mayor called me and he said, can we set up a citizen engagement process and speak with the citizens of Hamburg about where to distribute all those people. And then we set up a map of the city of Hamburg. We visualized all public spaces and spoke about distributing all those people for the next few months and years. So this was only about temporary housing. This project was not about integrating them in a long-term perspective. It was more about where to put all those people so that they can stay clean and safe. It was really kind of emergency situation. This was the tool. This is how it looked like. So you could speak about the city at different scales, like you had a kind of the whole city. Then you had the district scale and then you had the neighborhood scale. And people who came to our lab, they were citizens, normal citizens. We took them as local experts for the city and asked them, what do you think, where are public spaces where we could build a temporary accommodation. So they could work with these bricks and you see here this frame to speak about their ideas of or empty spaces of the city where we could then put the people. At the end it was a long process that took five months. We screened the whole city of Hamburg and we had a lot of results. We found a lot of empty spaces like parks or sport areas or also parking areas. Unusual places that a city planner from a perspective that is more distanced sometimes doesn't know. From this project, we have developed another one, which is the digital participation system. I mean, you have this in other European cities too. So people can comment on a lot of city planning issues like housing reforms of mobility and so on and so on. Everything is also open source. In our case, we have a very strict open source policy of transparency law, which is very important for us, makes us very easy to work. And at the moment we are setting up a new tool that I like a lot and that is very, very well accepted by by experts. This is the planning tool, not for citizens. It's really for experts. We call it COSY, Corporate Social Infrastructure. It's a web platform for working with social infrastructure data in combination with urban data. So it's a tool for data relations. It's like we have a master portal, of course, and the planner can access data in real time or in runtime. This is important and it's closely developed with a lot of different stakeholder groups from the city of Hamburg. And here you can see a little bit some some detailed information about it. We work at the moment with approximately 64 indicators like population area households and so on and so on. We map this also in time series for presenting trends, actually what Gary showed us with the city, how the city looked like the building. This is a bit what we do with social data. We map them also in this time series so that you can see what about the schools, what about the kindergartens, did they get more or less. And it's a lot about supply analysis, so how many playgrounds during a child or accessibility analysis. We did all the COVID tests and does now how can we access them in a very few minutes. And also we are able to compare a lot of areas like population density, for example, compared with another district in regard to population density. So COSY is well accepted and it's something that we really grow and we would also integrate this to the twin and just one sentence to the digital twin. In our case we have an urban data platform, we have all those tools that I showed here very quickly, and we are going to integrate all those tools now to the digital twin to have then more a centralized way of putting all this data in there and also modernizing and also modernizing and creating scenarios. Okay, so then Unitak just a few sentence. As I said, we are now setting up a kind of lab which is more or less the same that we have done for Hamburg now for many years for the United Nations. They discovered our lab in a way and they said that they want this also to but for a global perspective for working with us in cities in the global south. It calls Unitak and we follow the goal number 11 sustainable cities and communities or regions. And yeah, when we speak about cities from a global perspective then of course the challenges are a little different more than 20% of mankind lives in informal settlements. So we have very basic requests like for example mapping setting up urban data platforms. Also a lot of cities need a lot of participatory government systems like they also want to speak to the citizens. Democratic governments know that top down planning doesn't work also in those cases. And of course co co designing tools and we do work a lot also with augmented reality virtual reality so that you can dive into the city in another way and see more rooms or spaces public spaces in another way. So I would say that I stop here. Maybe we can go a little more in detail in the following discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. He's a theme of representing these platforms for collaboration and also he project of Unitak and I would like to start with the first question. So, yeah, you just explained that collaboration is so elementary in urban planning and just give us an example how the actors find each other when you plan when you do those platforms and planning. Yeah, and we have different different cases, of course, I mean when we do a citizen engagement and it's an open call. We just open calls, and people can just enroll with a website very easily to us they can register and then they can come to our lab and work with us so that's that's very easy and very open. More interesting is maybe the question your question in regard of stakeholders. And we have a very, very close relationships to this different authorities in the city of Hamburg. So very often we get direct requests from them so it's really often that the mayor or the estate secretary or someone calls us and say look, I want, I would like to have a map on mobility on certain issues on mobility. I would like to send you all my employees, because they have to plan this in a way. So it's, it's for us we don't we don't have to find them usually they come because we get, we have our work flow is so closely connected to the authorities that then we have all the stakeholders on board. And what I really would like to underline is the most important thing is interdisciplinarity. It's very banal, but it happens so often that people meet in our lab in front of those tables and maps from different authorities and they've never seen each other before. And this makes a lot of people start to speak to each other. And the finding places was very, very crucial in regard of this because refugee accommodation, it's about finances, it's about education, it's about health, it's about everything spaces. So this was really great that all those people met, they had to meet it was kind of like I said emergency situation, and that helped setting up a better workflow between the authorities. So bringing science into practical work into the practical world as you just explained is a very important thing and you do it with the kind of labs or just explain us. You just called that the authorities are in front of your door. And so do you have tools to bring those platforms from science into practice. Yeah, I mean, all those tools that we are setting up like the deepest tool, the cozy tool, also the finding places tool, they are all implemented to the city. So it's, we also do basic orientated research. It's not that we, but we, our research is very much applied. So all those tools run, they're all open source, the codes are all on GitHub. We always try to set up also a coding community around those tools when we, when we deliver them. We just did that's with a deep pass we organize the big conference we invited all the cities in Germany in this case this was a national project. And then we try to set up also a coding community. And we are now, for example, adding to the steepest tool and participatory budgeting project. So what we call Burgam, which is in German. This is also a big issue in a lot of European cities. And this is good for us to know that there is already a coding community around it now they are trying to set up this. And it's, it's like a community work at the end. Very interesting. And the other thing you just had your short overview was only tack. And this is because you work as an UN consultant and deal with urban planning there in the global south. And yeah, we just saw that that you focus on informal settlements. So, where a quarter of humanity lives so what are the challenges there compared to cities like Hamburg, for example. Yeah, it was quite interesting we this we set up this lab at the beginning of this year so it's still quite new. And we opened a call some weeks ago for the whole world so all countries would apply at Unituck for technical support or for their needs and we got a lot of collaboration data collaboration. And that was quite interesting. First thing was, they all need open data infrastructures they all need a good data management system, a good urban data hub otherwise you cannot deliver service to your people. Then mapping is the other very, very crucial issue. When we speak about informal settlements, sometimes we don't know how many people live there we don't know how do they organize water access education. So there is a huge lack of, especially qualitative data, but also quantitative data both. So mapping, then the dialogue tools, and I found it so interesting to see that people in Nepal and in Cambodia and in Brazil. They want to have the same like communication tools between government and citizens like we do it here in Europe there's no no difference. And then planning tools as I said, and of course, what also is very requested are monitoring tools so like monitoring, for example, resilience factors for countries are monitoring the SDGs, for example, so monitoring systems. This is something that a lot of a lot of countries we need. So this will be the topics or the tools that we are going to work on with Unituck. Perfect. Thank you very much, Gezat Sima for sharing this overview about your platforms and your work in science with us about smart city planning and we would like to continue with our third speaker in this panel today. And after that we will do the talk with all speakers as I already mentioned, but right now I would like to welcome our third guest who is Professor Dr. Volker Kors. And Volker Kors studied computer sciences at the TU downstairs and did his doctorate in computer graphics. And since 2002 he has been professor of computer science and geoinformatics at the Institute or University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart. And his research focuses on 3D spatial data infrastructures and the visualization of spatial data. His big topic or his topic today with an overview is the use of 3D city models in the energy transition and his statement is 3D city models paved the way to carbon dioxide neutrality of cities. This is very interesting. So the next four minutes go to Volker Kors. Welcome. Thanks for the invitation to this interview talk. I appreciate a lot. As you mentioned, I would say focus on the statement how can we from geoinformatics and with data contribute to this global challenge of climate change and especially carbon neutral cities. Because that's a worldwide for my point of view, maybe pandemic is another challenge as well, but the climate change is a big one. And it's difficult to deal with that because you don't see the results or the changes. It's not so obvious because it's long term changes. But on the other hand, last week, the Munich Security Conference shared a new security monitor that the documents they deliver every year and to evaluate or assign the most security issues perceived by the citizens worldwide. And in Germany, number one, number two are climate change and extreme weather events based on climate change, not pandemic, what I was assuming. So that's really big challenge. Yes, I would call it a 3D city model. It's not big city. It's a rural area in Landkreuz Ludwigsburg next to Stuttgart. We use our tools we have developed on heat demand simulation, etc. for a climate protection plan of the county of Ludwigsburg, which includes it for districts that was done some years ago already. But you see here clearly, and I think that is the same situation in every European country, private households or heating of housing contributes to 40% of the CO2 emissions. And the second big thing is transportation industry, of course, as well, but for cities, they just by living, you have a lot of CO2 emissions. And that is something we need to change. And here's an example how this can look like. That was a recent study and I moved to the north now, not to the global south, but that was a study we did last year with the city of Helsinki. Why? Because from my perspective, Helsinki has a very, very advanced 3D city model and digital twin. So not only the geometry, but a lot of additional information also for on energy demand of households. And in this application, you can explore it online. We did some scenario calculations how different aims of the municipality can be achieved. And one big question is, Helsinki wants to become zero carbon neutral in 2035. So it was based on the 3D city model and some extra information and climate change scenarios. You can simulate CO2 emissions in 2035 or heating demand, first of all, in 2050 and see which strategies lead to which result. And that is one, for me, one very important use cases. Combination, Geri mentioned it in this talk, as well as the combination of data-driven simulations. So combining simulations and models with data and with the 3D model, you have much better representation of the real world. And in this example, we used the different scenarios of business as usual scenario where you say, okay, if you don't do anything, you have the refurbishment rate of buildings. You have climate change, so winters will become warmer, heating demand goes down anyway. So the question is, is this relevant and how much is it? And if you don't take any action, then in Helsinki, heating demand will go down to 85% compared to 1990. And that obviously is not sufficient to reduce CO2 emissions, but not significantly. And then we did other scenarios like district heating, network scenarios, refurbishment of 3%, which none of the European cities has, but that's an assumption. And with the combination, you can try which, say, action has an impact and which combination of impacts lead to your goal. And the result here is zero carbon from the building sector was not achieved in our simulations, but a reduction by over 80% can be achieved, mainly in Helsinki with the district heating network using renewable base because most of the buildings attached to district heating networks in Helsinki as well. And as I mentioned, we have the building sector, but we have the transportation sector as well. And this is from me, that was an experiment we did together with the city of Stuttgart in Siegesburg. This year, or I started last year, and results were published this year, where we tried to connect the building model, so the 3D model with transportation data and with traffic flow data. And this is fetched from a here API, so from another data source. And we built an interface, we treat this movement as traffic flow data as sensor data as well. So with this combination and coupling the 3D model with sensor data from traffic information and collect this data over time, we have more or less a real-time map of traffic flow for the major streets, not all streets, but the big ones. And based on this, we can estimate those CO2 emissions, but also in that was for us, even more interesting noise level, because then we can query and that is safe from my perspective, very big contribution of digital up and twin in contrast to a city model. And here now we can query things like where are the buildings with high density traffic and a low traffic flow, which means traffic jam, which means noise. And then we can identify buildings in the 3D model to say, okay, these buildings are most affected by this situation. And that is for me, it's this connection of the different sectors, building sector transportation sector using the digital twin, having slow changing data like buildings and fast changing data like sensor data like traffic and use both of these sectoral data in analyzing tools to find some interesting correlations and things like that. And that is for me one of the key elements and what smart city contributes to the entire game of urban planning and traditions. And this is data driven. So for this, you need an urban platform, you need an API, not only data, but an API to access the data to be able to analyze the data, both slow changing things and fast changing things. Thank you. Thank you very much for your course for sharing this presentation about the 3D models, the role of 3D models with us. And as we just could see, the 3D model is the heart of the process towards climate neutral cities and which kind of data plays a role in there. And how are they linked? Could you just explain that to us? Which kind of data? You just said four minutes time. So, for the simulation, we need this 3D building model, which is, how gives us a volume? We don't heat floors, even though the numbers indicate that, because we always calculate kilowatt hours per square meter, but indeed it's kilowatt hours per cubic meter. And areas, we heat volumes. And the 3D model gives us a volume of the building. That's very, very essential information from my perspective. And of course, we need to have some information about the building height, so which materials have been used, which are the U values of the materials. So we can calculate heat transfer coefficients to see which much heating demand or cooling demand we do the same studies in Singapore as well. And heating is zero, but cooling is higher than heating in Europe. So we need to have information about building physics. And this information we usually use based on the so-called building physics libraries that are available in Germany by the Institute. We can connect in Umbel or in Europe by the tabulas of these data sources that are coming from a very different domain, but we can connect it to the buildings in our simulations. And of course, whether climate information is extremely essential for that, that is also something we need to connect to the sitting models. And so we use this as a data integration platform in that sense. Okay, thank you. And you just showed us the pictures of the model of Helsinki. And what about other cities? Do you work on that or do you know from them? Yes, we also work together with the city of Rotterdam to do similar simulations. And also in some city districts in Stuttgart, of course, not for doing the simulation for the entire city, but in specific districts where new urban designs are ongoing, like the heart of Europe is called the district behind the main station in Stuttgart, for example. And as I mentioned, we had some case studies in Singapore as well. So yes, we use this and we share the tool as well. So I know other cities use our software, it's free software to do the simulations without us, which is fine as well. Like Valadolid in Spain, I'm aware of that. And we also heard about the speakers before from Giza Zima and Gerhard Schröder that the topic of cooperation and collaboration is very important. And so science and municipalities must work hand in hand to bring those city challenges forward. And how do you go about that? We have some initiatives and especially since Corona, we were approached as Professor Zima just said in Hamburg, the city of Stuttgart approached us and to help them with public participation process. Because it moves to the digital space, so we use the tools also to set up digital twin and add a participation tool to support online participation using the 3D model, and try to simplify things visually so you can have the context and you do not need to read abstract plans, but you get a better imagination by using 3D visualization plus additional information and integration of questionnaires. So yes, we are doing this together with the city of Stuttgart. And I think it's essential and it would be even better to have it in a combined way that you can choose the tools at specific locations where the planning is ongoing. See the reality plus have digital information. So we have a lot of experiments with using augmented reality to superimpose the future into the reality. But that's at the moment quite hard to do all of these reasons. Okay, so Falka Kors would like to open this panel again to Gesar Zima and Gary Schröter, because we are also like to use that experts warm intelligent about digital urban planning with all our experts today. And yeah, this is right now the time to get into discussion to talk to each other and also if there are questions in the audience from our participants there. I saw two questions for Gary Schröter. But first of all, let's start with an input from my side to all the three of you are also to our audience. Yeah, the aim is to find really rapid solutions to the challenges in the areas of living transport and the environment in the cities. So what do you have to what do we have to do to advance the digitalization of cities and thus achieve sustainable developments for the benefit of the people more quickly because this all seems to me so they are very good best cases there are some cities who really move forward, but then there's, then you see the news, then you hear about climate problems, the influx in cities, the refugee problem and the pandemic situation as we are all still in. They have so many things. How can we go on more quickly? Do you have solutions about that or ideas? What do you think do we need? What are the challenges? Maybe we start with Gesar Zima. That's a big question, isn't it? This is why we have you today to be brought you together to bring that solution. I'm able to answer this, but I think my impression is always there's so much technical innovation around when you go to cities in the world. I mean, you mentioned Singapore, Helsinki, those are also our reference cities, of course, we all know the Helsinki model and they are friends and colleagues and so on and so on. But my, my feeling is very often when we work in cities, those innovations have to become real. The most important thing is that they reach people. And sometimes the tools that we set up in our lab, they are not rocket science, technical-wise. I mean, we work with MIT, we experiment a lot. But the ones that we really use, then they are sometimes very simple, also for the twin. I like this example with the trees that you showed, Gary, because this is super simple. You can plant trees, you can put them away and then you can measure CO2 reduction. And this is what people can work with. And I also imagine our twin working really like this then at the end. Very, very, like, I call them simple use cases, but with simple, I don't mean that the challenge is simple. I mean that they are very, very simply to use. They have to be approachable in a very, very simple way. And this is my, so I'm not, I don't fight for more innovations. I fight more for bringing this innovations really to the people and set up good workflows with the authorities at the end, with the planners, with the stakeholders and also with the citizens. Yeah. Gary. Thank you very much for that input. We just found out in the city of Zurich when we talk about efficiency, I'm always laughing when we talk about participation and efficiency. Because a city itself, if you want to do participation, for sure you have a long process. There's many, many different people involved, different situations. And for me, the most important thing is what you have seen in that video now is, I would like to bring our ideas closer to people that they understand what we are doing. That's the reason in Geomatics, normally when you have a point cloud, everybody says to you, we have a point cloud. That's the first product that we have to move on. We have to move on. We have to move on. No, we don't have to, because I think a point cloud itself, especially when you talk about vegetation and you talk about making people understand that the digital between is above and underground, it's a very, very good tool to discuss because it has a transparent view, very simple. So you can look through, you have an understanding of what's going on. And for the simulation process, you can do something else in the digital world, which is not seen. But for me, the key point is really that we are, let's call it faster or being more accepted or having a better quality. The key part is that people understand different stakeholders, understand what we are doing and visualize it in the best possible way. Of course we're using augmented reality too, but I found out with augmented reality, when you stand with 10 people on the space and you have all that HoloLens is on, it's great to discuss, but the main point is missing. You cannot look each other into the eye. So you don't have the communication with each other. So it's very simple again, but technology is great, but we have to use it in the most simple way on the surface, of course, that people accept what we are doing and people understand that the digital twin is not a monster in digital space. This is something to help to make more attractive places, for example, for the city of Zurich to enjoy. Yeah, the same question also to Falka Kors about how to achieve those aims about climate neutrality and things like that in mega cities. I would say we have to be realistic. At least I work with data and information here. That does not change the world in that sense, not the physical space. Even though we call it digital twin, if they change something in the digital world, nothing happens in the real world. So we can provide information, but someone needs to take action as well to change the physical space as well. That of course is a challenge, but I think information is a value and can contribute to that. It's not the solution to everything, but it can contribute. For example, maybe it's a German thing, but in Germany, almost everyone knows the consumption of a car. It's a big thing. People talk about it. They want to have, okay, where can I get the cheapest fuel, et cetera. Almost no one knows about the energy consumption of a building. That's the question why. Because I think it's more abstract. It's not so obvious. You do not need to fuel it every day. But if we find better ways to show this and make it more aware than the consequences, I think then we already achieved things because that will make more people to think about it and recognize, okay, I can change something by myself. I don't need authority to improve the world, but I can contribute by myself. That is essential and here information can help a lot. And money as well. Yeah, but yeah, this seems to me, we know about so many technologies and data and solutions and models. We know that from the intergeal platform where all the exhibitors with their solutions and things present their technical achievements, their innovations about solving these huge problems. But sometimes it seems to me that when you are in your daily life, it's just as you mentioned with your example about energy savings in your house and so on, but gaining money when fueling. This is so important to bring it into the head and the heart of the people. So is it the politics? Is it the media industry? Is it the municipalities? Is it the schools? Who has to bring those information into people's head and mind? Can I add something? I think it's also very important, and we all mentioned this a little bit, not so specific maybe to connect citizen data to the tools that we are creating, like the city or the university or whoever, because citizens, they produce a lot of data. I mean, sensors are getting cheaper and cheaper. You can put them on your backpack, drive with your bike to the city and then can collect data about air quality, for example. And this is also a challenge for us. We have to have the state agencies. That's very important. They host the data. They look at the data as in good quality. They set up master portals. This is very, very important standardization and so on and so on. But connecting citizen data to those centralized data, this is also one of the most important things. And this creates, at the end, also acceptance, like you said, and also awareness of data production. Anybody has something to add, or what Giza just said? Yes, I totally agree with that. The technical solutions already exist from my point of view. We experimented with this Luftartner info, that is the citizen initiative from Stuttgart, and we provide the data using the things API. But of course, you need to organize this as well. It's not only the technical solution, but you need to talk to the people. Yeah. Also to the citizen here, in this case, it's a small group of retired people, very enthusiastic. But of course, they have a process to integrate their work into such a platform. That's not happening by itself, and you cannot ask for too much from the volunteers. And we just talked about the city. What about the rural areas? Do we also have to bring more digitalization and smart planning in there, and there will be then many more opportunities? Yeah, Falka. I'll start with a short answer from this energy transition. The rural areas have a big advantage. We have also several projects with small cities or rural areas. And in most cases, if you want to change something in your energy system, more renewables, it simplifies things if you have space, and the rural areas usually have the space. So for them, it's much easier to work and contribute to these things. So I think the hard part really is the densities. I think Giza, you also showed that from the UNITAC project. You mentioned the need of the people there is the same. Yeah. I think what you said, that's very important, that we connect the rural areas to the city areas. And in the post-pandemic times we are living in now, I think work will change also. People will work more at home. So density will be different now. You can see this already in cities. The connection between the rural cities and the city, this is an issue that we should take care of and we should collect common data. In Hamburg we call this the metropolitan region. I mean, the city is 1.8 million. And when we speak about Hamburg, we actually data-wise always speak about 5 million. So we always try to already try to do this. And we also try to transfer our tools, of course, to a rural region. But this should be taken into account much more. Did you see in the chat, Johanna Fleischer had a question to all of you regarding the point of interdisciplinarity. In the presentation I saw two aspects, the simulations strongly related to material and one approach giving solutions to inform transfer between users, planners. Shouldn't a twin also exploit the possibility of combining these approaches and how could that look like? I guess it was the presentation of Volker. Yeah, maybe I can start with two answers. One technical answer is in the concept of digital twins. We had a very nice meeting organized by the OGCE early this year with an international forum on people that build technology for digital twins. And there was more or less a consensus that there is not one digital twin, but there will be domain specific digital twins that need to be connected. So we have energy digital twin and water digital twin. And we do not need to do the connection or the details, but on some say higher level then need to be connections between these different digital twins. And how to organize this is of course also people. So at HFT we have a protocol called ICD or Intelligent City where we work with an interdisciplinary team with building physics, urban planners, architects, geospatial people. And I think this is also, you have to bring together people that are willing to work together. Yeah, Gary. Hey, if you do one project in the city of Zurich for example or in an administration you always work together with many, many different stakeholders. So this one example of planting a tree involves so many different experts and there are so many questions related for example just plant one tree in the city that you always need to have a collaboration with each other and you need to have those platforms and that information that people understand what you're talking about. That's the reason I said before. If you want to do a collaboration you have to find a way to visualize it in the easiest way and understandable way and more closest to reality. It's very similar to a picture so that people understand that. I think this you have always for any kind of task for any kind of situation you want to plan or you want to change something to mount different stakeholders and collaborations you have to bring together. About that situation of many or how many digital twins that's a long, long discussion with many, many different people. So what is the digital twin? Do we have a plural version of it? We have digital twins. So if you have a house for example it comes mostly also from building and construction business where it is in the building information and modeling world the term of a digital twin for a house, for a whole house was introduced, but of course you can challenge it down and say every different port or every different glass or every different part of a house for example is a digital twin of something else because it can have a sensor involved. For us at the city of Zurich it was somehow clear that it's the digital twin we call it the digital twin of the city of Zurich with different components and those components we don't go too deep into detail we say for example one topic could be the traffic one topic is the vegetation one topic buildings so we don't want to go too far into that detail but for sure there will be a lot of different digital twins appearing and one more aspect with all those different tools I mean for us at the city of Zurich what we are trying to find out now is a certain kind of standardization process for different data sets so we have that geo server where different organizations can share their data we want to extend like I showed in the one graph before we want to extend the geo server and we are starting with very similar data sets with just points so we are starting with 3D points we are starting to build the point cloud server where different organizations can work with different point clouds because we found out that everything else we are doing above those point clouds brings in totally new standards totally new ideas of how the geometry for example could look like and the other challenges of course also then to share all that building information modelings that are already from architectural competitions for example of course we want to share them too inside the city of organization so for me that data the data part is really really important that we have a clear mind of making it not too complicated and trying to find out an essential part that we can share inside of the organization thank you very much we are at the end of our one hour talk smart city intelligent urban planning is digital I would like to thank the audience for your attention and of course this very interesting panel of smart city planner urban planner experts very enthusiastic and engaged and it was very interesting to bring us in short overview about your ideas platform solutions insights and I guess we could continue for another hour but right now this hour is over so thank you very much for joining us and please if you are still interested in intergeo or the topics of intergeo follow intergeo on LinkedIn on Twitter on Facebook yeah it's just the next event will be in August it will be announced here on LinkedIn and on at the intergeo website and so at the latest we will see us in September at the intergeo live and digital and this is from the 21st to the 23rd of September and thank you and bye bye