Responsive Cities: Mobility & Engagement

The CREATE Principal Investigators monthly Seminar Series features Dr Pieter Fourie and Dr Devisari Tunas. They present two cases of "Responsive Cities" - the first on simulating the impact of autonomous vehicles on urban mobility, and the second on the deployment of smart systems in a kampung (village) in Bandung, Indonesia.

Integrated Urban Design and Simulation for Autonomous Mobility by Dr Pieter Fourie

Shared autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMOD) promises to transform the mobility landscape in Singapore, leading to concomitant changes in urban form. The talk covers a workflow developed by the Engaging Mobility team at the FCL that allows one to explore and anticipate the interaction between this new form of mobility and the shape of the future cities that it will serve. By integrating agent-based simulation into the urban design process, it becomes possible to explore a range of AMOD deployments in response to network and land-use scenarios, and navigate the trade-offs between urban quality and accessibility.

Several extensions have been developed for the open source agent-based transport simulation, MATSim, allowing one to test future urban designs for various combinations of operational parameters of the AMOD system. A set of initial experiments for a series of urban designs for a future neighbourhood illustrate the principle of the integrated design/simulation process and how operational parameters may be tuned to provide required levels of accessibility in a given urban design. The work is developed by Dr Pieter Fourie, Sergio Ordonez, Tanvi Maheshwari, and Biyu Wang from the Engaging Mobility team at FCL.

The Speaker
Dr Pieter Fourie is the project leader of the Engaging Mobility group at FCL. Pieter has more than 10 years’ experience in agent-based transport simulation, and has been an active developer of the open source external page MATSim project since 2008. He wants to bring these tools into practice, and see simulation used in neighbourhood sketch-planning. Pieter obtained his PhD from ETH Zurich while at FCL and received the ETH Medal for his PhD thesis 'Data-driven Transit Simulation'. He is also a fellow of the World Economic Forum Global Futures Council on Mobility.


Kampung Smart Systems Bandung Dr Devisari Tunas

With a long list of innovations in urban governance and citizen engagement, Bandung has been the forefront of the Smart City movement in Indonesia. Not everybody, however, is engaged in its smart systems, especially those who live in the informal settlement and represent the bulk of the population. How can the government make sure that their planning decisions are inclusive enough towards this group?

FCL, with the support of Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), is working hand in hand with Bandung’s city municipality to address this issue. This presentation will present the outputs and the lessons learned from this research activity in Bandung known as the Kampung Smart Systems. How can we engage this marginalised group? What signifies the concept of Smart City in Indonesian cities?

The Speaker
Dr Devisari Tunas is the research scenario coordinator for the Archipelago Cities scenario at FCL. Trained as an architect and urban planner, she obtained her PhD degree in Urbanism from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, and Master's degree in both “Conservation of historic buildings and towns”, and “Social and cultural anthropology” from Katholieke Universitet Leuven in Belgium. Devisari is currently co-leading several ADB and SECO-funded research projects in Indonesia with Prof Stephen Cairns who is the lead principal investigator, namely in Bandung, Palembang, Semarang and Makassar. The projects focus on the development of smart systems and a planning tool which aims to help decision makers to make better informed, integrated and inclusive planning decisions in the city and metropolitan level.