Can sensor data help us run a city park more efficiently balancing ecology with activities to generate revenue and engagement?

 

Partners

The Royal Parks, EE, City-Insights

 

Nature, in the form of urban green spaces, is central to making cities liveable. From air pollution mitigation and the high biodiversity they support, to the vast social and public benefits, the value of green spaces and urban parks is rarely disputed and cities around the world are prioritising ‘urban greening’ on their agendas. Yet at the same time, the need to develop cities further, and with limited land available to do so, is putting increasing pressure on existing urban green spaces.

ICRI Cities are partnering with the Future Cities Catapult and The Royal Parks to implement an Environmental Monitoring project focusing on one of the world’s great municipal green spaces: London’s Hyde Park. Designed to prototype and test an innovative network of wireless sensors, including soil, air, water and more, the project collects unprecedented near real-time data on the park’s eco-system and social fabric, and explores how technology can help us manage and experience urban parks in imaginative new ways.

 

Technically we are focusing on the practicalities of deploying heterogeneous sensor platforms where access to power is constrained, monitoring the reliability of the data being captured and exploring different communication strategies such as muling and mesh networking.

Key outcomes:

We have deployed different sensor platforms on existing Intel Galileo based gateway architecture (weather, light, air quality and agri sensors).

We used live sensor data to drive responsive story telling in the park via a City-Insights app.

We used anonymised and aggregated mobile phone data to track the flow of people through the park.