European cities face common challenges concerning their quality of life: degradation of the urban environment, significant risks for citizens health, traffic congestion causing stress and economic inefficiency, progressive damage of the artistic and monumental heritage. Additional difficulties derive from the lack of integrated tools that allow cities to make balanced decisions on a wide range of issues. The aim of ISHTAR Project is to build an advanced software suite for the analysis of the effects of short term actions and long term policies to improve the quality of the environment, citizens health, conservation of monuments. The suite will include both existing and newly developed models, covering the areas of citizens behaviour, transport, vehicles emissions noise and safety, pollutants dispersion, buildings related atmospheric emissions, health, and monuments degradation. These tools will find an integration in the use of a GIS and a user-friendly interface software. The models suite will be an innovative tool for advanced urban management and will allow the integrated analysis of the various environmental effects of technical and non technical measures. This will represent an attractive alternative to the usual separated analysis of the effects of such measures on the various elements of the urban environment.

Objectives and approach

The integration of a large number of software tools and the creation of specific modules for the advanced simulation of key processes such as transport behaviour and its direct impacts on the urban environment will allow the build-up of an innovative and powerful decision support tool for urban policies optimisation.

The achievement of a high spatial and temporal flexibility in the use of the tool will maximise the possibility of use from local short term actions to widespread long-term policies, thus being of interest for different categories of users. A high level of technical innovation, in terms of both development of new tools needed and balanced integration of these with existing and marketable tools, will create a new method and an innovative software tool for assessing urban policies. Specific modelling efforts will be performed in the representation of policies effects on citizens behaviour, in the integrated 24hr simulation of traffic emissions, noise and safety, in the microscopic analysis of air pollution effects on health and monuments. The maximisation of the European Added Value, deriving from a wide and geographically representative consortium, the development of Stakeholders oriented activities, based on a thorough organisation of dissemination, and the contribution to a widespread socio-economic issue, represented by the decreasing urban quality of life, will originate a potentially huge market for results dissemination and exploitation. The exploitation of the models suite will begin within the Project with the application of the tool to the analysis of measures tested in the seven involved cities: Athens, Bologna, Brussels, Graz, Grenoble, London and Rome. The designed strict coherence with EU Policies for Environment, Transport, and Urban Life Quality, together with the proper liaison with relevant Projects in the whole 5th FP, will guarantee the expected resonance of the project within EC research effort.

Expected Impacts

The key result of ISHTAR Project will be the realisation of a multi-impacts models suite for the assessment of a wide menu of measures for urban life quality. The application of the tool to the measures tested in the involved cities will provide indication of tool usefulness, accuracy, applicability and estimation of impacts on health, environment, monuments. The users involvement will provide evidence of the impact of the performed research. The availability of the ISHTAR suite will allow in future public administrations and consultant companies to run integrated and advanced environmental assessment of short-term actions and long-term policies for the improvement of the urban quality of life. This twofold opportunity can bring environmental and health benefits on one side, and employment opportunity and improved efficiency of the urban system on the other. The main immediate beneficiaries of the new decision support tool will be the local authorities, having the chance of optimising integrated and not conflicting urban policies, and citizens living in cities where the recovery of public health, transport efficiency and artistic heritage will be carefully designed and measured.