What do people need in order to feel that a city is livable? Urban planner Andrea Gebhardt, president of the Federal Chamber of German Architects, proposes some ideas: “There must be this connection between uniformity and diversity. I think that if there’s only diversity, we become confused. If there’s only uniformity, there’s monotony.” Ideally, she says, the city is not a place where many people live side by side. Alongside mono-functional areas such as playgrounds, there must always be public and especially green places where people can meet. Carlos Moreno, scientific director of the Chair of Entrepreneurship Territory Innovation at Sorbonne University in Paris and one of the world’s most renowned smart city experts, says, “Our enemy in any city is mono-cultured activities or mono-cultured functions. This is why we have to focus and prioritize multi-functional developments. If you have the possibility for developing a new or existing district with a multi-purpose function that includes economic activities, cultural activities, artistic activities, educational facilities, and medical facilities too, functions that make better use of the infrastructure, we will make huge progress. We can automatically reduce our carbon footprint, we will increase our economic performance, and all in all, we will create more humanistic and socially inclusive neighborhoods. Inclusivity is so important that cities must work with local clubs, associations, and other communities to create socially and culturally diverse districts.” Moreno is the driving force behind the – by now well-established – concept of the 15-minute city in which technological innovations play an important part. “We certainly need technological disruptions to develop more close-proximity cities. These technological disruptions, for example, could be platforms, such as mobility platforms, or cycling in a city. We need technology to improve bikeability, for improving sharing capabilities, and even for things like a participatory budget. We need comprehensive technological platforms for managing it all. We need platforms for monitoring everything, for example, we could talk about pollution, we need ways to monitor fine particles, so we need access to new technological solutions to help tackle these problems,” says Moreno. But who does the city really belong to? Cyclists, pedestrians, residents, shop owners, everyone has an interest in having a say in urban planning so that car drivers won’t be ignored. Andrea Gebhardt comments on that: “Of course, residents have an interest in parking their cars in front of their doors. Of course, shop owners have an interest in their customers picking up their purchases on their doorsteps. But now it’s about developing smart concepts. Maybe it makes sense to establish lockers for temporarily storing purchases.”

700 km

(435 miles) of bicycle paths have been created in Paris and the metropolitan area of the French capital in recent years as part of the 15-minute city concept. In addition, the city planted nearly 200,000 new trees, expanded the public transportation network in certain areas, and rerouted traffic away from the banks of the Seine.

In urban production settings, factory floors are being replaced by office spaces, resulting in neighborhoods, that are former industrial areas, being transformed into mixed-use districts. Many of us are familiar with abandoned freight train tracks such as the High Line in New York City’s former Meatpacking District or find the mix of apartments and startup offices in Shoreditch in the eastern part of London exciting. “Reviving cities in places like these and attracting work back into downtown areas is a sensible component of urban planning that will continue to progress in the future. I’m primarily thinking about vacant department store complexes that can be converted into vibrant neighborhoods in that regard,” says Professor Bernhard Friedrich from TU Braunschweig. The reason is that retail is taking place less and less in large areas such as consumer electronics stores or department stores because the internet may be more effective in that field. At the end of the day, nobody feels that downtown areas becoming spookily deserted after hours are a good idea. A prime example of the successful transformation of a brownfield into a bustling urban district is the Werksviertel district in Munich (pictured).

© Ivana Bilz

What used to be Europe’s biggest dumpling kitchen (“Pfanni”) initially morphed into Europe’s biggest clubbing district and ultimately into an award-winning neighborhood featuring everything that it takes to win recognition: small studios next to huge office spaces, the world arts and subcultures, high tech and low tech, bars and restaurants, and a small herd of sheep on a roof – they all can co-exist productively. The secret formula of the Werksviertel: instead of opting for demolition and short-term profits, the owners chose conservation, redensification, and a diverse mix of uses. They imagined other purposes for the existing buildings, transformed a dumpling factory into an office, business, and studio building, or converted a potato flour silo into a hybrid sculpture now accommodating a hostel, hotel, and climbing center. Digitalization and technological innovations fundamentally transform workplaces and work processes. Thanks to high-speed internet, powerful cloud services, and communications tools, employees can work from practically anywhere. Co-working spaces offer freelancers, startups, and even large companies flexible office spaces, often in the middle of urban areas. For cities, that means that traditional office facilities must be reimagined. Friedrich: “Companies are going to reduce their permanent office spaces and opt for hybrid models instead, resulting in the emergence of multifunctional facilities in downtown areas combining work, networking, and recreational activities.”

2,500 m²

(27,000 square feet): That’s the size of the WERK3 urban pasture in Munich’s Werksviertel district, where a small herd of Valais Blacknose sheep graze. In addition, there are flowers and wild herbs, raised beds, bird nesting boxes, as well as a beehive and an insect hotel. A shepherd attends to all of that. His job is in the middle of the city, on the roof of a high-rise building. It’s a showcase project of urban climate adjustment.

Cars are crowding the streets bumper to bumper flanked by the hustle and bustle on bicycle paths and sidewalks. It seems as if many cities are running out of space for integrating modern transportation technology into existing urban infrastructures. A prime historic example shows how an innovative means of mass transportation can successfully be integrated into a cityscape. Following the examples of European metropolises like London, Paris, and Berlin, the big German city of Munich “simply” went underground in the 1960/70s. “For me, Munich is still the perfect integration of forward-looking transportation infrastructure,” says Professor Bernhard Friedrich, a renowned transportation planner at TU Braunschweig and member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. The Munich Subway, he says is seamlessly integrated with the S-Bahn hybrid urban-suburban rail system, buses and streetcars so that passengers can easily switch between various means of transportation without long waiting periods or complicated transfers. Bernhard Friedrich illustrates the point: “Public transportation is the backbone of our mobility and will continue to be. That’s because it works, but: in the future, public transportation must become increasingly personalized.” Talking about on-demand. Besides “Uber,” arguably the internationally best-known hailing app for personal rides, zillions of local governments and businesses have recognized the trend. “Via,” for instance, headquartered in New York, offers software and operation for flexible local public transportation. “Via” has been optimizing the entire public bus and on-demand transportation in that big American city as well as the city’s special chauffeur service. That enabled the creation of a fully integrated transportation system making the suitable service – line or on-demand – available exactly at the times and in the places where it makes the most sense. In the German city of Hanover, “Via’s” “sprinti” service, Europe’s biggest service that is fully integrated with local public transportation, replaces inefficient bus lines as well. This has resulted in 100,000 bookings per month, equating to a tripling of bookings in the space of just nine months. Even more importantly, 40 percent of the passengers would have taken their cars without “sprinti.” Friedrich: “In the near future, I can also imagine automated concepts for on-demand services with some degrees of freedom for privileged rides. In other words, like car pool lanes in the United States. Where conflicts might arise with pedestrians and bicycle riders or residential quality such vehicles would have to travel in convoys at slower speeds. That would also lead to greater public acceptance of autonomous mobility.”

2

models of air taxis are supposed to conquer the airways above Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia, in the future. Larger taxis that in addition to the pilot can haul up to four passengers and their luggage, plus smaller cargo aircraft for up to 100 kilograms (220 lbs.) of goods. Professor Bernhard Friedrich is skeptical: “Air taxis are a meaningful complement, but will hardly be able to organize mass transportation in cities.”

Highly automated driving: Schaeffler supports transition in the transportation sector

More and more people and goods need to be hauled, but there are fewer and fewer drivers. Even at this juncture, nearly 250,000 vacancies cannot be filled worldwide. The International Road Transport Union (IRU) assumes that that number might triple by 2028. With autonomous buses, taxis, and vans, the impact of the driver skills shortage might be mitigated. In addition, driverless systems can help make mobility services that so far have not been very attractive economically lucrative for providers because the drivers’ payroll costs account for a major portion of the total operating costs – that is, roughly a third in Europe. All of these are reasons explaining why there’s such a great need for autonomous driving technologies. With innovative chassis technologies enabling highly automated driving, Schaeffler supports the required transformation of the transportation sector. The relevant products, for instance, include the Electrohydraulic Steering System (EHPS) and the Advanced Sensor Cleaning System (ASCS). Schaeffler has been supplying the redundantly operating EHPS to the production line of a Chinese commercial vehicle manufacturer since 2023. The Advanced Sensor Cleaning System was developed by Vitesco Technologies for cleaning the cameras and sensors of autonomous vehicles to ensure impeccable performance.

“The idea of the city is ancient. People organized themselves in cities because that has many advantages in organizing society,” says Professor Bernhard Friedrich from TU Braunschweig. Consequently, the growing urbanization that can now be observed is a logical development. More opportunities, more diversity, better supply, and support. “There’s a lot speaking in favor of people wanting to live in cities, and little in favor of permanently returning to the countryside. Neither do we need the same number of people as before in rural areas because most of the farming work today is done by machines,” says Friedrich, who has clear views on advanced urban living concepts. “It may sound old-fashioned, but going forward, perimeter block developments, in which apartments in the form of a closed structure are built around an inner courtyard, will continue to be the most attractive form of urban living, especially from a social and environmental point of view,” Friedrich explains. Due to the clear separation between public street areas and private inner courtyards, a clear structure emerges as well as quiet, protected inner courtyards that can be used as private or semi-public green areas. Perimeter block developments, he adds, are often more sustainable than detached buildings because they need less energy for heating and air conditioning. But will that concept suffice to counter the growing housing shortage? Friedrich doesn’t feel that the idea of jump-starting completely new cities such as New Capital that’s currently being built in the desert 50 kilometers (31 miles) away from Cairo has great merit: “I’m very skeptical if urban development projects like that can be funded permanently and be designed to be so attractive that they’ll soon be populated.” Let alone aspects of sustainability. Associate professor Dr. Philipp Rode, executive director of the LSE Cities research center in London and an internationally recognized urban planner, expresses an alternative approach to urban development when he says that we must guard against a further commercialization of public space. Instead, we should use the opportunity to achieve cultural change. Children need spaces again for playing and experiencing, where childhood in the city means something totally new again. We also need clearly more unsealed areas, more trees that help us better cope with heat and rain.

In 2008

more people, worldwide, were living in cities than in rural areas for the first time in human history. The United Nations Population Fund anticipates five billion people to be living in cities in 2030 and roughly 6.7 billion in 2050. That development shows that the struggle about climate protection will be won in the cities.