iSCAPE Research
To develop guidelines for sustainable air pollution control, a rigorous assessment of the existing passive control systems, behavioural interventions and sensing technologies was carried out first. Interlinks between air quality and climatic variables were studied to design such emission abatement strategies that also account for current and future climate scenarios in the iSCAPE cities. This was followed by a variety of field campaigns to evaluate the effectiveness of each project intervention: Bologna (green infrastructure with focus on trees and photocatalytic coating), Bottrop (urban design and planning), Dublin (low-boundary walls), Guildford (green infrastructure with focus on hedges), Hasselt (behavioural interventions), and Vantaa (green infrastructure with focus on green roofs and walls). The studies conducted in real-life environments were enhanced by extensive simulations to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed interventions at three different scales: the street, the neighbourhood and the urban scale.
Some key scientific findings are listed below, but all results tailored to different target groups are available on the iSCAPE website (
https://www.iscapeproject.eu/results/)(si apre in una nuova finestra):
• Green barriers can produce a reduction of concentration of Black Carbon up to 52%, PM1 up to 31%, PM2.5 up to 17%, PM10 up to 15%
• Low Boundary Walls can protect pedestrians from nearby traffic pollution by reducing air pollution at certain sections of the footpath by 16-19%
• Road trees can reduce pollutant concentration up to 40% and reduce local air temperature by 20C
• Photocatalytic coating can generate a reduction of pollutant concentration up to 40% near the wall in the lower part of the canyon, and an average reduction of NOx concentration of 10-20% in the street canyon
iSCAPE Living Labs
Established early in the project, iSCAPE Living Labs brought together a great variety of urban stakeholders and citizens, to solve such complex city challenges as air pollution and climate change by facilitating value co-creation and enabling multi-stakeholder collaboration in a real-life setting. During the course of the project, iSCAPE Living Labs delivered more than 30 citizen engagement activities, increasing citizen awareness and knowledge of air pollution and its impact for healthier cities. These included co-creation workshops, ideation and prototyping events, as well as feedback sessions.
iSCAPE Technology
During the course of the project, two types of low-cost sensors (Smart Citizen Kits and more advanced monitoring stations) were developed, following an agile approach with multiple development cycles and incremental performance improvements. Throughout the project duration, these sensors were continuously tested and their performance improved to meet the expectations and requirements of their end-users, including citizens, researchers, and public authorities. Smart Citizen Kits were used as part of the citizen science workshops conducted in each iSCAPE city to increase the awareness of personal exposure to air pollution in addition to developing citizen science communities and are now commercially available. The more advanced monitoring stations were tested at different stages of the project to validate the sensor performance in co-location with reference equipment, collect data for calibration purposes or to assess the effectiveness of passive control systems. All developed technologies are documented at:
http://docs.smartcitizen.me/(si apre in una nuova finestra)
