sMArt roots

As part of the Mannheim Smart City initiative sMArt roots, the HDIL developed interactive visualizations to support the analysis and communication of urban data. The work explored visualization approaches for both exploratory analysis and public communication, with the goal of making complex topics accessible to a broad audience, ranging from air quality, to urban mobility, to climate resilience.

Together with research groups from the University of Mannheim, and the University of Hamburg, the HDIL has been part of the Smart City Mannheim Lab. In addition, Prof. Dr. Till Nagel is member of the Smart City advisory board of the City of Mannheim.

Outcomes

We conducted a series of participatory co-design workshops with citizens, city officials, and local stakeholders to gather requirements and perspectives. These informed both the smart city strategy and the design of the visualizations.

At the Federal Garden Show Mannheim 2023, we presented the initiative in a public pavilion featuring interactive dashboards and physical input visualizations, engaging a large and diverse audience. The Federal Garden Show has been visited by more than two million people. (See Huber et al. 2025 IV)

We developed a mobile air quality application that provides real-time, location-based information via QR codes at measuring stations, complemented by historical data for context. This situated visualization enables citizens to access and interpret data directly at the place where it is measured. (See Huber et al. 2023)

In addition, we designed an interactive climate exhibit for the Smart City Showroom, using a dual-screen setup to explore relationships between urban form and local climate at both city and neighborhood scales. (See Huber et al. 2025 EnvirVis)

Background

At the heart of sMArt roots was an agile process for developing and implementing a validated and networked smart city strategy for Mannheim. Two platforms have been provided for this purpose:

• The communication platform connects different actors from citizens to technical experts through different formats and invites these stakeholders to discuss and work on the strategy.
• The technical data platform and a set of applications verifies the practicality of the strategy and identifies newly emerging issues. The principles of data ethics are reviewed and concretized on the basis of different data generated within the framework of three domain applications.