As one of the biggest megatrends of the 21st century, urbanization affects both recent and established industrial countries. In the European Union, already more than 70 percent of the population live in an urban area. In Germany, the uninterrupted urban growth is likely to pose huge challenges for many municipalities in the future, in areas like traffic, energy, environment and health. For this reason, innovative solutions in terms of city planning and city development are required. Additionally, increasingly demanding citizens expect a high quality of life and improved citizen services. To address those challenges, traditional routes must be tested, old infrastructures modernized and administrative processes organized more efficiently.

CITY NEXT INITIATIVE

One solution to the issue is to link currently isolated individual areas in order to enable new interdisciplinary options for action, whereby new technologies take on a sustained key role. With the help of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), the urban service offer can be optimized while simultaneously ensuring low energy consumption and reduced pollutant emissions

"Thanks to Microsoft Azure, we can reliably provide the UrbanPulse platform and any value-added services based upon it via Cloud Computing."