Semantic Urban Elements: Conference 2023

Cities are complex systems facing complex challenges. At the same time, they are rapidly growing and growing in importance. This introduces a paradox: we ought to simultaneously understand and design our cities. Hence, we need approaches that tightly couple advances in urban science and urban design.

Semantic Urban Elements (SUE) is our proposed approach, focusing on a topical coupling towards an integration of both evidence-based design and design-based evidence principles. Similar to Design and Science, the concept of Semantic Urban Elements is at the same time a process and the outcome of that process.

The SUE approach integrates three key components (represented by the modules’ three work packages): urban data analytics to better understand today’s city, agent-based scenario simulations to better understand future proposals, and semantic representations of how both integrate into urban design and its goals. In addition, each component develops methods to link, explore, and validate relationships between general knowledge and individuals’ knowledge. For the respective components, examples of such methods are crowd-sourced urban data, digital participation, and case-based search engines, respectively.

Understanding Scenarios: Adaptable Services and Infrastructures Based on Citizen Participation

Semantic Representation Supports City Planning: Site Search Example

Understanding Cities: Global Streetscapes — Crowdsourced and Enriched Dataset of Street-Level Images for Urban Science Research

Adaptable Infrastructures: Cooperate Adaptable Lanes for Safer Shared Space and Improved Mixed-Traffic Flow

Integration and Strategies / [SUE] Semantic Urban Elements
Principal Investigators: Asst. Prof. Dr Filip Biljecki, Prof. Dr Dirk Helbing
Co- Investigators: Dr Rohit K. Dubey, Dr. Pieter Herthogs, Prof. Dr Christoph Hoelscher
Researchers: Dr Rohit K. Dubey, Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, Chenyi Cai, Dr Matias Quintana Module
Coordinator: Dr Matias Quintana