Monitoring for sustainable and inclusive urban areas

Urban areas need to rethink their policies to strengthen their capacities to prepare for and respond to hazards and become more resilient, intelligent and inclusive. In this context, one of the objectives is to ensure the resilience of their services and systems against multi-hazard scenarios, where the effect of local hazards combines with global challenges such as climate change and pandemics. Moreover, the concept of inclusiveness is becoming crucial, as highlighted during COVID, which showed that the most vulnerable population is the one living in sparsely and densely populated areas, where the level of social and physical services is often inadequate [1].

In this context, one possible response to this need is the development of monitoring and surveillance approaches [2]. The present contribution will focus on three aspects

The first is that resilience must be addressed as a whole, since services and networks are interconnected and interdependent (e.g. health system, transport, energy and water distribution, air quality, protection from extreme weather events, etc.). The main consequence of these interconnections is that the complete collapse of services (blackout) may become a realistic possibility.

The second aspect is that resilience can only be achieved in the presence of continuous and detailed monitoring of both the structures/infrastructure/services and the territory on which they insist, and that without such a monitoring it is impossible to correctly define the interventions to be carried out and their priorization.

The third aspect concerns the development of new monitoring systems based on Earth observation, positioning, navigation, and ICT technologies that exploit the citizen as a sensor and the so-called ‘non-sensors’, i.e. sensors that provide useful information for monitoring even if they are not designed for this purpose. All this ‘sensory’ data must be integrated to obtain a complete and reliable awareness of the scenario; hence the need to process and systematize large amounts of information that can only be processed by AI and HPC.

 

[1] V. Cuomo F. Soldovieri F. Bourquin, N. -E. El Faouzi, J. Dumoulin. The necessities and the perspectives of the monitoring/surveillance systems for multi-risk scenarios of urban areas including COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the TIEMS Annual Conference, 18-20 November 2020, Paris, France, ISBN: 978-94-90297-19-0, vol. 27

[2] Cuomo V., Soldovieri F., Ponzo F.C., Ditommaso R. (2018). A holistic approach to long-term SHM of transport infrastructures. The International Emergency Management Society (TIEMS) Newsletter 33, pp. 67-84.