Whether Berlin, Frankfurt or Stuttgart, more and more people are moving to metropolitan urban centres. In 2012, 75 per cent of Germans were already living in cities. The continued influx of people is increasing the demand for housing, mobility, infrastructure and resources in the metropolitan areas. Today, cities are already responsible for 75 per cent of our energy consumption and 70 per cent of our human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Considering this development, cities are facing major environmental and social challenges.

What should the sustainable city look like? How can it be made more intelligent, more sustainable and thus more liveable? In order to find answers to these questions, Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences has joined forces with companies and municipalities from the Stuttgart Metropolitan Region to form the i_city partnership. Under the direction of physicist Ursula Eicker, the partnership within the Intelligent City project aims to use information and communication technologies to make urban districts in Stuttgart more intelligent and more energy efficient.

The starting point is always to determine the current usage as well as future development potential for specific residential and commercial areas. Urban planners and architects, as well as industrial psychologists, are called upon in this regard to involve all users from the very beginning and to achieve a high level of acceptance. Existing and new neighbourhoods are then depicted in three-dimensional city models and various simulation applications are included. The process involves heating and cooling demand calculations for all buildings, heat network planning and the integration of renewable energies, but also the calculation of the urban microclimate including emissions and pollution from particulate matter.

Other sub-projects of the i_city partnership are concerned with increasing the efficiency of buildings, for example through intelligent and controllable windows for controlled ventilation as well as lightweight constructions with integrated photovoltaic systems. Innovative transport concepts such as the provision of services for car and e-bike sharing in the city centre round off the urban energy system concept.

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is supporting the research project with about four million euros within the framework of FH-Impuls as part of the Research at Universities of Applied Sciences programme.