As part of the growing interest in cities to address persistent sustainability issues in society, ‘smart cities’ have increasingly become a ubiquitous phenomenon globally. For multinational enterprises (MNEs), this has provided opportunities to develop and market technological innovations to facilitate …

In an on-going smart city development project, we are exploring the potential of distributed conversational speech interfaces in the public context of a city. By using the well-known Wizard of Oz method in combination with a lo-fi prototype, we involve participants in co-design with the focus on potential …

Beyond the potential of new layers of urban infrastructure - sensor-laden networks, big data, artificial intelligence - to optimize cities functionally, lay promising opportunities to also use these technologies for new forms of social interactions. In an ongoing smart city development project, we explore …

Speech interactions are often associated with virtual assistants and smart home devices, designed primarily for private contexts. A less developed domain is speech interfaces in public contexts. In a smart city development project, we explored the potential of distributed conversational speech interfaces …

Purpose - This paper aims to explain the influence of facility design on urban quality of life from the perspective of students' research. The outcome of this paper is to determine the influence of facility management (FM) on the quality of life to citizens in the city of The Hague by actively using …

When it comes to shopping and spending time in the city, much of the traditional offering has made place for something new, usually more expensive: coffee bars like Starbucks with a wide range of cafés and lattes; bakery stores with a big choice of luxury croissants, sourdough, gluten free or spelt bread; …

Increasing urbanization and the effects of climate change will bring new challenges for cities, such as energy saving and supply of renewable energy, preventing urban heat islands and water retention to deal with more frequent downpours. A major urban surface, the surface of roofs, is nowadays hardly …

The Netherlands is the largest export country of cut flowers in the world. Air cargo transport of flowers amounts to 25 percent of the total annual tonnage of goods that go through Schiphol Airport. However, due to uncertainty of the future development in international trade, as well as the increasing …

Urbanization around the world has taken a flight towards rapid, sometimes uncontrolled growth. Megacities expanded, whilst erasing the developable area and adjusting the existing landscape to artificial water and nature systems. This rampant expansion often leads to monotonous new neighborhoods, often …

In this chapter we move back in time, to when it was not an usance to base our city designs on the natural systems of water and ecology. By the end of the 1980s the dogma of separation of functions, and dividing the city in areas for working, living, leisure and traffic was slowly abandoned and especially …