Webinar: Demystifying space technologies for cities, communities and regions

Thursday, March 28 2024 | 13:00 - 14:00

This is the first edition of a webinar series organised by the EU project SPACE4Cities. The goal of these webinar series is to increase the awareness about the potential of space technologies for cities, communities and regions in Europe, provide information on opportunities that space-based technologies could offer them and explore successful use cases where such technologies are applied to solve cities’ challenges.

The first session will be of introductory nature and set the scene for subsequent deep dives into space technologies for specific challenge areas.

Event details

Europe has made significant investments into space technologies like navigation (e.g Galileo) and Earth observation (Copernicus). These systems are promoted by the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) as they provide rich sources of data and services that conveniently cover large geographic areas across Europe.

Data produced by space technologies can efficiently augment existing geo-spatial data sets to improve decision making and deliver new insights that have not been available before or are difficult to obtain at scale. Services enabled by enhanced navigation and positioning capabilities can improve how fleet and public services can be coordinated in different situations or how assets and logistical processes can be managed in urban areas.

While cities and communities are used to working with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), their use of space technologies so far has been rather limited. This is partially due to a lack of understanding regarding what space technologies can offer to them together with recent innovations that are emerging from the use of space data.

As a result, there are many missed opportunities for cities to take advantage of these capabilities to solve difficult challenges they are currently facing, be it urban space management and mobility, disaster response, air quality, better use of constraint resources or net-zero transition. Space technologies provide the potential to make cities and communities more sustainable and resilient.