The main objective of this research proposal is to develop a smart traffic-management system that works in an automatic, distributed, self-organized way, to control (i) traffic signal lights and (ii) route guidance based on recent, advanced sensor technologies, which provide sampled-identified data such as V2I communication. We think More
Novel sensor technology represents a significant potential for traffic management in cities. Thermal cameras in particular have recently gained considerable importance and are now also to be used in the Traffic Management Department (DAV) of the City of Zurich. In this context, the determination of accurate travel times More
This project focuses on developing integrated control solutions (i.e. co-ordinated ramp metering: RM and variable speed limits: VSL) to manage congestion on motorway networks. An efficient real-time solution of this problem requires the development of new control methodologies that are based on advanced techniques from the domains of More
The SNF-funded research project «Densifying Switzerland» examines factors that affect the acceptance and local democratic support for densification projects in all 162 Swiss cities. Densification is the central paradigm of the current revisions of the Swiss Spatial Planning Act. There is a broad public and scholarly consensus that More
Zukunftsfähige Verkehrs- und Transportsysteme sind gefragt, die das Ziel unterstützen, die Treibhausgasemissionen bis 2050 auf Netto Null zu senken und erneuerbare Energiequellen zu nutzen. Die ETH-Schulleitung hat der Gründung des neuen «Center for Sustainable Future Mobility» (CSFM) als Kompetenzzentrum der ETH Zürich zugestimmt und eine Anschubfinanzierung für vier More
The project was funded by the Network City and Landscape (NSL) to investigate the impact of flexible designs in coping with the uncertain future offices demand. The potential growth in the home-office working mode poses a large uncertainty on the future offices demand. Flexible offices can help limiting More
Infrastructure systems are susceptible to hazard events, which disrupts their functionality leading to direct and indirect consequences for their stakeholders as well as the public. Therefore, infrastructure managers need to execute interventions to improve the resilience of their system of interest. Due to the complexity and interdependency of More
Was wären gegenwärtig für die Schweizer Planungspraxis relevante Forschungs- und Lehrthemen? Wie positionieren sich die Raumentwicklungsabteilungen der Schweizer Hochschulen mit Blick auf die Bedürfnisse der Fachpraxis? Wenn Sie solche Fragen auch schon beschäftigt haben, dann können Sie jetzt die letzte Gelegenheit nutzen, um die Umfrage der Spatial Transformation More
The future of rail transport will be one where trains carrying passengers and goods flow seamlessly from their origins to their destinations. Potential disruptions due to train incidents will be foreseen with the extensive use of surveillance technologies, and either prevented through the implementation of detailed action plans More
Wie erleben wir die Atmosphäre eines Ortes, wo fühlen wir uns sicher? «Streetwise» stellt die menschliche, visuelle Wahrnehmung von (Vor-) Plätzen, Gehwegen, Strassen usw. mit Hilfe von künstlicher Intelligenz dar. Planerinnen und Planer erhalten so eine Entscheidungsunterstützung. Die zentrale Variable der Innenentwicklung, nämlich die Wahrnehmung von Qualität, kann More
Video jetzt online! In einem Dialog für Praxis und Hochschulen nahm das Netzwerk Stadt und Landschaft (NSL) der ETH Zürich am 11. November im Volkshaus Zürich eine Standortbestimmung für die räumliche Entwicklung in der Schweiz vor. Ausgangspunkt bildeten Erkenntnisse aus der Pandemiesituation, Hintergrund der Klimawandel. Die Tagung war More
ETH Zurich has recently launched a new center for augmented computational design in architecture, civil engineering and construction. 24 professorships, including the NSL chair of Christophe Girot, are joining forces under the name Design++ to develop digitally enhanced design methods which support rational and intuitive decisions during the design More
Dr. Anastasios Kouvelas is the Director of the Traffic Engineering and Control research group at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems (IVT), Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich (since August 2018). Prior to joining IVT, he was a Research Scientist at the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS), EPFL (2014-2018), and a Postdoctoral Fellow with Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH) at the University of California, Berkeley (2012–2014).
Cities rely heavily on the services provided by water distribution networks. These networks are large and complex, consisting of thousands of kilometres of buried pipes and dozens of facilities where water is treated, pumped and stored. Infrastructure managers are entrusted with the planning and execution of interventions on More
Während Siedlungsnetzwerke im vergangenen Jahrhundert wuchsen, schrumpften vor allem Lebensraumnetzwerke. Im neuen SNF-Projekt EMPHASES werden wir die Dynamik dieser Netzwerke im Schweizer Mittelland untersuchen, indem wir historische topographische Karten klassifizieren. Wir werden langfristige Regelmässigkeiten und plötzliche Veränderungen im Wachstum oder in der Schrumpfung dieser Netzwerke analysieren.
Neben dem Lehrstuhl für Planung von Landschaft und Urbanen Systemen (Prof. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey) sind in den letzten Jahren zwei neue Forschungsgruppen im Institut für Raum- und Landschaftsentwicklung entstanden: Raumentwicklung und Stadtpolitik (Prof. David Kaufmann) und Spatial Transformation Laboratories (PD. Dr. Joris Van Wezemael). Ein neues Video stellt die More
Values of the ecological infrastructure in Swiss parks Commissioned by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), the interdisciplinary research team in charge of the research project ValPar.CH examines the benefits and added values of the ecological infrastructure (EI) in parks of national importance. This network of More
Enabling transformation: Linking design and land system science to foster place-making in peri-urban landscapes under increasing globalization. Unprecedented urbanization is threatening landscape diversity, bringing along new social and environmental problems. Standardized business centers, single family residential areas and shopping malls displace highly productive agricultural land, while the culture More
Nature and biodiversity are not only essential for the existence of human societies, but are also threatened by the expansion of cities and transport infrastructure. As much as human societies depend on networks of settlements that are well connected by roads and rail (i.e. settlement networks), animal species More
System-wide transportation risks are not well understood across modes, regions, and critical interdependent sectors, creating uncertainty about risks resulting from a major system disruption. There is a lack of resilience schemes, especially for the long term, integrated into transport infrastructure due to an inability to monetize resilience for More
Until recently, urban planners and designers gave little consideration to the multifunctional design of green spaces. This was partly because quantitative information about the extent of ecosystem benefits was not readily accessible to landscape professionals. Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), Singapore-ETH Centre has developed an ‘Ecosystem Services-Design Loop’ that More
What is the future of the manifold agricultural territories across the world that support contemporary cities? While discussions on urban sustainability have focused on cities and urban regions, many agricultural territories are equally exposed to rapid and far-reaching urban transformation processes with massive social and environmental implications, opening More
FCL Global addresses the globally significant challenges of expanding urbanisation and aims to create a better understanding of the relationship between the city and its surrounding region, so as to make city-regions more sustainable. Following FCL Global’s Launch Event on 2 March 2021, FCL Global Co-Director Professor Sacha More
This short paper sets out the basic dilemma of transport policy making today, as how to strike the balance between the benefits of accessibility and the induced externalities in terms of sprawl, greenhouse gas emissions and congestion. The impacts of the Corona19 pandemic sharpens the dilemma.
The capital city of Madagascar, Antananarivo, is a high-altitude city. Traditionally, the Merina culture settled on hills dominating rice cultivation in the plains. However, urban growth is changing this landscape fast as city dwellers are more and more settling in the rice plain. This growth also raises the More
Mountain forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration and protection from natural hazards. Forest cover in the European Alps has increased over the last century, but in recent years, these forests have experienced an increasing rate of natural disturbances by agents such as windthrow, More
The uncertainty on the future treatments demand, recently evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, makes it challenging for hospitals managers to determine the optimal design of new clinics. Flexibility can help in optimally minimizing the service risks when the benefits of the investments justify the costs, considering the dynamism of treatment More
Road owners are increasingly being confronted with the need to optimize highway design for an uncertain future. A recent research project at the Infrastructure Management Chair investigated the use of a real options-based method to evaluate alternative highway designs for a fictive case study based on the A15 More
Die Herausforderungen der europäischen Raumentwicklung sind nur in transdisziplinärer Kooperation zu bewältigen. In einem sich dynamisch verändernden Europa mit seinen komplexen Wandlungsprozessen sind neue, integrierende Planungs- und Entwurfsansätze gefragt, um den Zusammenhalt zwischen den Ländern und Regionen zu stärken.
Call for Papers by 29 January 2021. This is a call for papers for the panel Urban policy analysis: Theoretical and empirical developments that David Kaufmann (ETH Zürich) and Mara Sidney (Rutgers University) organize at the 5th International Conference on Public Policy in Barcelona from 6-8 July 2021.
Inward development calls for open modes of governance After fifty years of spatial development not sustainable with regard to land use, energy consumption, or infrastructure costs, the only alternative to overcome this development is to transform and advance existing spatial structures. Historically, Switzerland has evolved from a landscape More
The Spatial Transformation and Design unit explores processes and potentials of spatial transformation and its consequences from neighbourhoods to transnational scales. Its research focuses on mechanics of change and methods for collaborative processes of spatial transformation using design as a key element dealing with complex problem situations.
During public transport disruptions, the performance of the public transport network is degraded due to unexpected events, resulting in delays and inconvenience for passengers. Therefore, the infrastructure managers and operating companies typically generate a new public transport timetable, called disposition timetable, to reduce passengers’ delays, thereby limiting a More
This paper presents a case study based on accident reports from the Zurich City Police. Using a joint GIS and time series analysis based on negative binomial regression, the data is analyzed to identify trends in accident development for several accident subgroups (e.g., bicycle accidents, senior citizen accidents, More
Parking garages are often currently designed assuming that parking demand will be stable over their lifetime. The looming mobility shift towards automated vehicles (AVs), however, makes parking demand highly uncertain, with some scenarios leading to its complete disappearance at some time in the near future. The design of More
Most cities in Canada do not charge a stormwater fee; consequently, stormwater programs may need to compete with other funding priorities in public works. This often leads to a lack of dedicated and predictable cash flow, which can limit municipalities’ capacity to sustain stormwater services.
Raum+ schafft sachliche Grundlagen zur Übersicht von freien Baulandreserven. Im Kanton Obwalden wurde 2016 eine Ersterhebung durchgeführt. Im Sommer 2020 wurde der gesamte Perimeter aktualisiert. Dabei sind die Gespräche mit den Gemeindevertreter*innen ein zentraler Ansatz der Methode. Die aktualisierten Daten sind auf der Raum+-Plattform aufgeschaltet und stehen den More
In many cities around the world, urban ecosystem services (UES) are under pressure. With a growing urban population, the pressure on UES in the remaining open spaces increases. The planning of new residential areas to accommodate urban dwellers increasingly requires the consideration of UES, especially when taking into More
In a cooperation between the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation (IKG) and the Chair of Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems (PLUS) a 3D Decision Support System (3D DSS) has been developed as a communication tool to support the planning of power lines. Now the 3D DSS has More