Smart& Future cities laboratory (SFCL) for Sustainable Urban Solutions

Summary

The last years, the world has changed rapidly in terms of urbanization and expected that by 2050 two-thirds of the world will live in urban areas. As a result of this rapid urbanization worldwide, smart cities emerged as a significant formation of cities that help in achieving sustainable development and smart growth. With the growth in technology worldwide, and as part of the UN global sustainability goals, establishing sustainable cities is one of those global goals, and the term sustainability nowadays is very connected with establishing smart cities and future cities. In Egypt the continuous growth in population and the concentration of this population in less than 7% of the total area of the country, made the government think all the time in distributing this population in new cities and urban communities. The New Urban Communities Authority aims to increase the urban area in Egypt from seven per cent to 14 percent by 2050. As a response, Egypt is planning to have 20 fourth-generation cities on a total area of 243,600 hectares, expected to accommodate about 30 million people in addition to providing millions of jobs. These fourth-generation cities are integrated cities in terms of availability of services and the use of advanced technologies in infrastructure and facilities; they will be the first smart cities in Egypt and the New Administrative Capital, east of the capital Cairo is one of those proposed smart cities. In Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Urban planning & design department, our aim as academic and researcher is to support the vision of the development of Egypt from one hand and to achieve with our research projects a futuristic urban solution to design and construct future and smart cities in Egypt. The aim of this project is the capacity building of the research team in terms of studying the complexity of urban systems in the cities in order to find smart and sustainable urban solutions for current problems and future challenges. The SFCL will be the research platform where four different research hubs and units will be established to serve to achieve the department research plan and college as well. The four research hubs are the digital fabrication, virtual reality, Internet of things in architecture and urban design and environmental studies and simulation. These hubs are concentrating on modeling the city in terms of using physical models, animation or virtual reality to measure current urban systems problems and propose innovative urban solutions.

Achievements

List of Publications from the Project

Partners

Project Members

• Ghada Farouk Hassan
• Marwa Abd El- Latif
• Samy Mohamed Zaky Afifi
• Marwra Aboelfetouh Elsayed Khalifa

Project Leaders