Last Friday I participated to the kickoff event of Alta Scuola Politecnica, the school of excellence for Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, which reunites the top students of the two universities for special events, courses and interdisciplinary projects.
The reason I was there is that we are proposing an interdisciplinary project on Students’ Quality of Life. The proposed project will complement the traditional efforts toward studying the quality of life (QoL) by the statistical institutes and environment research agency with new indicators leveraging people’s willingness to participate, and new technologies including both crowdsourcing and Volunteered Geographic Information. The Project will focus on Turin and Milan urban areas and devise new indicators of QoL based on the interest of the participants (e.g. sustainability of resource consumption – energy, water, land-, mobility, access to services, illegal waste dumping, measures of happiness and satisfaction, etc.)
It will then compare the results across the two cities and monitor evolution over time. It will also support the collection of official data by ISPRA and ISTAT. A useful starting point for the project will be the analysis of existing efforts in Europe in citizen-based projects and citizen observatories as well as the development of smart cities to integrate the provision of technologies with human capital development.
The project will be of interest to architects and urban planners, urban analysts, civil engineers, IT specialist and electronic engineers, transport engineers, and other specialization as they will be able to identify QoL indicators closer to their area of specialization and expertise. The Project will be work win close collaboration with the Urbanqool Project (Citizen Science Observatory of New Indicators of Urban Sustainability) of the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Digital Earth Unit.
The testing will be done on the student population to define indicators of quality of life of university students in urban areas.
The project will be in collaboration with the European Commission JRC (Joint Research Center) in Ispra, Italy.
Here is our poster and the JRC representative during the event:
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