Urban environmental data - see & understand
Category: Data and Systems

Challenge title
Urban environmental data – see & understand
Question
How can urban environmental data be prepared in a target group-oriented, innovative and interactive way?
Challenge description
Increasing urbanisation and climatic changes are global in scale with significant local impacts linked to quality of life in general and health aspects in particular. Collected environmental data can make the local impact visible.
Increasingly, environmental data are collected by sensors and published via various websites, platforms or portals. This includes data on various pollutants such as fine particulars, nitrogen dioxide or ozone as well as meteorological data, e.g. temperature or humidity.
Among other things, the collected data is the basis for municipal action to ensure healthy living and working conditions. But they also serve to inform citizens. Providing information on the state of the environment is a task of citizen-oriented administration and serves to protect health.
Understanding and insight into spatial contexts and spatial actions is promoted in particular by visual information. Clear and comprehensible communication can contribute to making administrative decision-making processes more transparent and creates the prerequisite for changing personal behaviour if necessary. The City of Leipzig would like to supplement the information provided so far and generate additional benefits for the target group of the public. Against this background, the City of Leipzig is looking for innovative and largely barrier-free solutions for digital communication for the public. The focus is on spatio-temporal geodata, which can be sensor data or model data. The suitability of the digitalisation solution is to be tested using the topic of air quality or urban climate as an example.
Added value:
- Urban service for online publication of environmental data
- Increased understanding of the environmental status of the city and of spatial processes and interrelationships
- Increased understanding of municipal action
- Generating knowledge and raising awareness among citizens, especially on health protection issues.
- Contribution to the development of the digital environmental atlas concept
Vision / Expected Result
Against the background of growing demands for data and information on the environment, the City of Leipzig would like to supplement and improve the existing information offer with new digital offers and integrate them into an interactive, digital-based environmental atlas.
The city is looking for a digital communication strategy for environmental data that conveys invisible data to the public in a visible, easily understandable and entertaining way. Smart, low-threshold, didactic tools such as an app/portal/virtual reality (VR) and/or augmented reality (AR) should contribute to the understanding of spatial contexts (e.g. pollution) and to raising awareness. In this context, sensor data from the area of air quality and urban climate are to be combined with technical background information and explanations of municipal tasks.
Consideration:
- Media-didactic and target group-oriented preparation
- Consideration of a user-oriented design
- Consideration of expandability to include additional environmental topics
- Consideration of a sustainable data structure
- Consideration/integration of the municipal geodata infrastructure
- Low maintenance effort for updating on the part of the City of Leipzig
- Examination of the linkage with the website of the city of Leipzig