The project „ Smart&UrbanTree “ explores artificial structures, which may serve as an supplementary alternative to other greening measures, such as trees and facade greenery, in dense urban contexts. Thereby, it is not a question of either / or, between natural greenery or artificial structures, rather an supplementary alternative where traditionals means are not possible. This impossibility could come either from lack of space or organizational issues. We understand by the term “smart urban tree” self-load-carrying structures, which contain a wide range of functionalities / amenities: These could be, for instance, urban shading, evaporative cooling water sprayers, photovoltaics and solar collectors for active electricity and hot water generation, fuel stations for E-cars, infrastructure for 5G-mobile standards and wide area WIFI. Nonetheless, the structures could serve for greenery.
Such structures can offer a contribution to city cooling, and thus to the reduction of energy consumption used for A/C and cooling units (Cooling energy demands and connected electricity consumption are constantly rising since years in the summer season).
The present project intends to research and develop as an exploratory project major aspects of such artificial structures, especially in highly-dense urban structures and in the Austrian context. As basic research reference projects, such as the Metropol Parasol in Sevilla, Spain, will be studied, as well as the basic knowledge necessary for construction, functions, and evaluation of their purpose. Based on that, requirement documents will be generated that define for different aspects the necessities. In a subsequent step, these different domains will be worked upon in detail. Moreover, a workpackages, dedicated to simulation is foreseen, which purpose it is to study the effect of such smart urban trees in lighting, shading, energy performance, air flow and similar.
A virtual testing of a smart urban tree will be conducted. Thereby, a dense urban structure of Vienna will be selected and the tree (or a set of trees) will be virtually applied, and the effect of the trees will be studied. These efforts will offer wellworthy insights for upcoming realization projects.
In parallel to the described efforts, the research project will be embedded in the academic context of TU Wien, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, in which design studies for the smart urban trees will be elaborated. Thereby, socio-cultural aspects are considered in this context.
