Sustainable City - Making a City more Efficient by City Information Station
Sustainable cities can have a more efficient environment if citizens can better plan and organize their daily activities. More readable cities can reduce extra urban trips, save time and reduce urban anxiety. Well informed citizens can also interact with their environment easier. While this objective has been discussed within the urban design discipline, it has not well attracted other related disciplines including those involved in decision-making for sustainable cities. As an attempt and a multi-disciplinary approach, a network of nodes –City Information Stations (Cinfo)– has been developed as one possible method that can facilitate to achieve sustainable cities and increase the efficiency of city in line with sustainable development objectives. Meeting these objectives is a complex and temporal process involving multiple decision-makers and stakeholders. The creation of economic wealth, social stability and environmental protection can be achieved through the development of products and services based on spatial information collected and share by all levels of government using a spatially enabled platform, where location and spatial information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity and product development. This paper aims to discuss and demonstrate a design concept of “City Information Stations” based on a Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) as an enabling platform for better management of information and in particular for large cities, using creative design solutions. The design of this network is based on the relation between: urban furniture design, city information, urban signage, and encouraging social interaction in the society.