Building smart cities with the Fitbit of the environment
It’ll be like a Fitbit - not only for your own health, but also for the health of your entire city.
Applying smart city technologies, and collecting data about the environments we live in, engages citizens to build more liveable urban environments that are cool, clean and quiet. By collecting real-time, hyper-local data on heat, air quality, noise and other factors, and making this data openly available to citizens, climate responsive neighbours enable new understandings of how variables interact to create urban systems, which can then be used to inform policy and respond to inclement weather patterns.
Lake Macquarie City Council, with the University of Technology Sydney, the City of Sydney, Nokia and Bosch, has been awarded a $860,000 technology grant from the Australian Government to investigate the application of low power, long range wireless networks to collect environmental data across two NSW city councils.
The Liveable Neighbours in Lake Macquarie project has been announced as one of 52 successful projects totalling $28.5 million under Round One of the Australian Government’s inaugural Smart Cities and Suburbs Program.
The Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) and the UTS Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT) will partner with Lake Macquarie to apply TULIP (Technology for Urban Livability Project); an environmental platform to empower climate-responsive neighbourhoods by enabling low-cost environmental data collection and sharing between communities, businesses and researchers.
This project has been supported by the LoRaWAN gateway that ISF established with Meshed on the top of Building 10 at UTS. This gateway was the first LoRaWAN gateway accessible to the community in Sydney, and is connected to The Things Network, to enable community based Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Liveable Neighbours in Lake Macquarie will demonstrate the potential for TULIP to improve environmental health by achieving three key outcomes – improving Lake Macquarie’s digital economy, supporting local business development, and rejuvenating urban spaces such as Charleston.
“UTS is very pleased to be working with Lake Macquarie on the rollout of this project, and excited to explore its potential in other city councils across NSW and Australia,”said ISF director Professor Stuart White.
