Reimagining infrastructure for a biodiverse future.

Civil infrastructure will be essential to face the interlinked existential threats of climate change and rising resource demands while ensuring a livable Anthropocene for all. However, conventional infrastructure planning largely neglects the contributions and maintenance of Earth's ecological life support systems, which provide irreplaceable services supporting human well-being. The stability and performance of these services depend on biodiversity, but conventional infrastructure practices, narrowly focused on controlling natural capital, have inadvertently degraded biodiversity while perpetuating social inequities. Here, we envision a new infrastructure paradigm wherein biodiversity and ecosystem services are a central objective of civil engineering. In particular, we reimagine infrastructure practice such that 1) ecosystem integrity and species conservation are explicit objectives from the outset of project planning; 2) infrastructure practices integrate biodiversity into diverse project portfolios along a spectrum from conventional to nature-based solutions and natural habitats; 3) ecosystem functions reinforce and enhance the performance and lifespan of infrastructure assets; and 4) civil engineering promotes environmental justice by counteracting legacies of social inequity in infrastructure development and nature conservation. This vision calls for a fundamental rethinking of the standards, practices, and mission of infrastructure development agencies and a broadening of scope for conservation science. We critically examine the legal and professional precedents for this paradigm shift, as well as the moral and economic imperatives for manifesting equitable infrastructure planning that mainstreams biodiversity and nature's benefits to people. Finally, we set an applied research agenda for supporting this vision and highlight financial, professional, and policy pathways for achieving it.

Monitoring Sensors for Urban Air Quality: The Case of the Municipality of Lisbon.

Air pollution is a global issue that impacts environmental inequalities, and air quality sensors can have a decisive role in city policymaking for future cities. Science and society are already aware that during the most challenging times of COVID-19, the levels of air pollution in cities decreased, especially during lockdowns, when road traffic was reduced. Several pollution parameters can be used to analyse cities' environmental challenges, and it is more pressing than ever to have city climate decisions supported by sensor data. We have applied a data science approach to understand the evolution of the levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter 2.5, and particulate matter 10 between August 2021 and July 2022. The analysis of the air quality levels, captured for the first time via 80 monitoring stations distributed throughout the municipality of Lisbon, has allowed us to realize that nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter 10 exceed the levels that are recommended by the World Health Organization, thereby increasing the health risk for those who live and work in Lisbon. Supported by these findings, we propose a central role for air quality sensors for policymaking in future cities, taking as a case study the municipality of Lisbon, Portugal, which is among the European cities that recently proposed be climate-neutral and smart city by 2030.

City 5.0: Citizen involvement in the design of future cities.

A citizen-centric view is key to channeling technological affordances into the development of future cities in which improvements are made with the quality of citizens' life in mind. This paper proposes City 5.0 as a new citizen-centric design paradigm for future cities, in which cities can be seen as markets connecting service providers with citizens as consumers. City 5.0 is dedicated to eliminating restrictions that citizens face when utilizing city services. Our design paradigm focuses on smart consumption and extends the technology-centric concept of smart city with a stronger view on citizens' roadblocks to service usage. Through a series of design workshops, we conceptualized the City 5.0 paradigm and formalized it in a semi-formal model. The applicability of the model is demonstrated using the case of a telemedical service offered by a Spanish public healthcare service provider. The usefulness of the model is validated by qualitative interviews with public organizations involved in the development of technology-based city solutions. Our contribution lies in the advancement of citizen-centric analysis and the development of city solutions for both academic and professional communities.

How to build Urbanome, the genome of the city?

The world's population is shifting to the cities, and consequently, cities worldwide are growing in number and in size. Cities are complex systems, making it extremely difficult to build and run cities in a way that all the elements of the system operate in harmony. Recently a concept of urbanome, the genome of the city was proposed to address this complexity. Here we first explore this concept and analogy, taking advantage of the potential of other 'omics, modern data collection techniques, Big Data analysis methods and a transdisciplinary approach. Then, we propose a theoretical approach to build the urbanome as a means of quantifying and qualifying population outcomes, being a function of the form of an urban area including the built environment, the physical and social services it provides, and the population density.

On the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak and the Smart City Network: Universal Data Sharing Standards Coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Benefit Urban Health Monitoring and Management.

As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) expands its impact from China, expanding its catchment into surrounding regions and other countries, increased national and international measures are being taken to contain the outbreak. The placing of entire cities in 'lockdown' directly affects urban economies on a multi-lateral level, including from social and economic standpoints. This is being emphasised as the outbreak gains ground in other countries, leading towards a global health emergency, and as global collaboration is sought in numerous quarters. However, while effective protocols in regard to the sharing of health data is emphasised, urban data, on the other hand, specifically relating to urban health and safe city concepts, is still viewed from a nationalist perspective as solely benefiting a nation's economy and its economic and political influence. This perspective paper, written one month after detection and during the outbreak, surveys the virus outbreak from an urban standpoint and advances how smart city networks should work towards enhancing standardization protocols for increased data sharing in the event of outbreaks or disasters, leading to better global understanding and management of the same.

Linking disaster resilience and urban sustainability: a glocal approach for future cities.

Resilience and sustainability will be two primary objectives of future cities. The violent consequences of extreme natural events and the environmental, social and economic burden of contemporary cities make the concepts of resilience and sustainability extremely relevant. In this paper we analyse the various definitions of resilience and sustainability applied to urban systems and propose a synthesis, based on similarities between the two concepts. According to the proposed approach, catastrophic events and the subsequent transformations occurring in urban systems represent a moment in the city life cycle to be seen in terms of the complex sustainability framework. Hence, resilience is seen as a requirement for urban system sustainability. In addition, resilience should be evaluated not only for single cities, with their physical and social systems, but also on a global scale, taking into account the complex and dynamic relationships connecting contemporary cities.