About the session
Sustainable urban development has emerged as a strategy and policy priority for city leaders. Modern day levels of urbanisation, already high and which continue to rise, mean that cities around the world share a common set of challenges for their future development and sustainability. These challenges affect mobility, resource management, the environment, energy, infrastructure and public buildings, government and citizenship, public safety, health, education, human capital and culture, and all this amid the burgeoning digital economy. All of these challenges have to be tackled based on sustainable economic development whilst addressing the specific needs of individual cities and their populations.
Cities around the world are actively and collectively working to define and address these issues. Governments and public authorities are responding by developing and building “Smart Cities” or “Future Cities”. Contemporary thinking about the integrated, sustainable city of the future – considering the city and its associated city region as a system – can however only be turned into reality through the adoption of a more integrated approach to both strategy and delivery. Many cities already use Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to address these challenges. Increasingly there is a growing awareness of the need to integrate ICT with other capabilities, such as “smart technologies”, new sources of data and information as well as cooperative and integrated systems.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme is dedicated to the development, implementation and pilot operations of Integrated Applications based on the demand of users and targeting sustainable operational services. The goal is to provide innovative, added value services by combining different space assets, such as Telecommunications, Earth Observation, Navigation and Human Spaceflight technologies, and integrating them with existing terrestrial assets and legacy systems.
Cities clearly present an opportunity to develop integrated, scalable services due to the scale and distribution of urban environments. Satellite-derived data, satellite services and the capabilities of space systems have the potential to play a major role developing and implementing new ideas and concepts for services that address the challenges faced by existing cities. It is expected that space technologies will play an ever more important role in applications that support the development and operation of Future Cities services. An overview of space capabilities and prospects is presented, illustrated from examples in the IAP programme.
