MindEarth (CH)
The CITYNEXT project is funded under ESA’s FutureEO program, through the call for “Industrialization of AI Methods for Decision Intelligence in Climate and Security Applications”, which supports the development of AI methods for decision intelligence in climate and security applications. CITYNEXT is an advanced AI-powered solution aimed at predicting urban growth, and related mobility patterns, along with their effects on urban climate and air quality. By interlinking these factors and focusing on forecasts over a 10-year horizon, CITYNEXT offers a transformative approach to scenario forecasting. The proposed solution aims to support urban planners and agencies to better understand the impacts of rapid urban expansion, increasing mobility demands, and rising environmental pressures. CITYNEXT will also enable the assessment of user-driven “what-if” scenarios, allowing end-users to explore the potential impacts of interventions in the urban environment. This approach provides insight into sustainable urban development, helping decision-makers testing policy effects before their implementation. CITYNEXT will be deployed in three pilot cities—Medan (Indonesia), Johannesburg (South Africa), and Warsaw (Poland)—each facing distinct urban challenges, with the intention to scale-up to additional cities in the near future.
The project leverages a variety of data sources from Landsat 5/7 and Sentinel-2 satellites, Digital Elevation Models (DEM), the World Settlement Footprint (WSF) dataset, key for understanding urban growth patterns, High-Frequency Location-Based (HFLB) mobility data to understand traffic dynamics and environmental simulation data. CITYNEXT framework involves the development of five models, each designed to analyze distinct aspects of urban dynamics: an Urban Growth Model to forecast urban expansion trends, a Human Mobility Model to simulate mobility flows and dynamics, a Building Height Model to estimate urban density, an Urban Climate Model for heat stress analysis, and an exploratory Air Quality Model to simulate pollutants concentration.
A key feature of CITYNEXT are the “what-if” scenarios as they play a crucial role in assessing the potential impacts of urban planning policies and interventions. These scenarios are designed to simulate and predict the outcomes of specific interventions to the urban environment, including: land use restrictions, road infrastructure development, building height regulations, adoption of Nature Based Solutions (NBS), and the implementation of pedestrian-only zones, while dynamically accounting for their impact on factors such as traffic patterns and air quality. In this way, CITYNEXT offers an innovative and comprehensive tool to help cities plan for future urban growth, manage infrastructure demands, and address environmental challenges in a sustainable and resilient manner. The “what-if” scenarios will be co-created and evaluated with end-users, ensuring alignment with real and current needs while fostering innovative approaches for future urban development.
