SmartSquare

An interdisciplinary guided tour of an urban testbed

Domplatz (Cathedral Square), Hamburg, Germany

Overview

SmartSquare is an urban testbed in the emerging domain of "Smart Culture in Smart Cities". The square is the so-called Domplatz (Cathedral Square), the location of the founding fortification Hammaburg, in the middle of Hamburg's inner city. It is in the immediate vicinity of the city's highly frequented shopping streets.

SmartSquare is a federally funded "Smart Service City" project with multiple-stakeholder perspectives on the activation of a culturally significant inner-city square in Hamburg, Germany, by means of digital cultural storytelling, data analytics, simulation and service innovation.

Challenge

The role and potential of culture in the context of Smart Cities is largely unknown. Most Smart City indexes and benchmarking tools do not include culture as a dimension or parameter. SmartSquare intends to contribute to the cultural impact discourse in Smart Cities. The square, for a long-time used as a parking lot, was chosen for its historical cultural significance, the de facto absence of tangible cultural heritage, its engaged local residents as stakeholders and for being a smaller urban unit to observe and explore smart cultural injections.

Approach

SmartSquare was designed as an urban testbed in which the tangible and the intangible representations intersect.
The methodological base followed an iterative procedure, starting with an empty measurement (status quo) and further surveys after each digital cultural injection.
Potential changes were examined in the analogue and digital spheres - research in the physical built space and its manifestation in social media.

Cultural Injections

ArchaeoScope

Physical interface into the digital archaeological AR/VR world

ArchaeoScreen

Digital signage installation at the bakery

HammaBot

Chatbot for cultural storytelling

Audio Tour

Guided audio experience of the square

Web Stories

Digital narrative experiences

Augmented Reality

AR applications for cultural heritage visualization

Key Outcomes

Development of the SmartSquare Collaborative Urban Data Platform
Cultural injections including ArchaeoScope, HammaBot, Audio Tours, and AR experiences
Interactive Dashboard for urban data visualization
CityScope integration with MIT Media Lab
Agent-based modelling for urban simulation
Instagram Mapping and social media analytics

Publications

SmartSquare: An interdisciplinary guided tour of an urban testbed
Jens Bley, Kay Hartkopf, Martin Niggemann, Anaïs Wiedenhöfer
2020 • ISBN: 978-3-7458-7023-7
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