Spatial information models as the backbone of smart infrastructure

What is it about?

With the pervasive application of smart building and smart city models on different geographies, the challenge remains to be in the very infrastructure upon which smart city platforms are fitted and constructed, particularly when addressing long term and short term urban dynamics. Long term urban dynamics were traditionally a subject of intense research in urban morphology, complexity research, economics, entropy and catastrophe theory. This trend in urban research was recently diverted towards thinking and modelling sudden and short-term dynamics induced by the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) and enabled by networks of sensors, citizen science, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and web 2.0 technologies. Short term and real-time visualizations of how urban systems operate were proven to be crucial to understand the impact of major disruptions and to identify thresholds at which these disruptions cause breakdown. An understanding as such is a key to embrace these new technologies in the design and evolution of sustainable infrastructure, moving forward to smarter cities. The complexity, short-term and long-term dynamics, combined with the need for universal, integrated and systemic solutions in response to urban problems, are presenting major challenges to policy makers and planners as well as designers and industries. These challenges triggers questions of the type; how to adapt urban infrastructure in such a way as to optimize the performance and operation of cities as systems of systems and embrace the influx of visual and virtual information flows?

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Why is it important?

The representational models of Building and urban morphology can perhaps serve as backbone models for a standardized infrastructure to integrate smart city and smart building systems. Whilst the description of building and urban morphology is static, relying mostly on how built environment is represented and how information is annotated and associated with each element, the description of smart cities would often entail the dynamics of day-to-day transactions and citizen-focused scenarios. This calls for an advancement of theories on building and urban morphology and their representational schemes, to enable the adaptation of technology for sustainable urban futures. Rather than seeking simple answers through reduction and representation, there is a need to attend to the full complexity that characterizes infrastructure interdependencies, encompassing transport networks, energy, operation and maintenance, inter-operability and adaptation. Henceforth, the main objective for this themed issue is to highlight key contributions in the fields of building and urban morphology that need to be accounted for when building spatial information models for smart infrastructure.