City Of Potsdam Research Articles

Building Footprint Generation by Integrating Convolution Neural Network With Feature Pairwise Conditional Random Field (FPCRF)

Building footprint maps are vital to many remote sensing applications, such as 3D building modeling, urban planning, and disaster management. Due to the complexity of buildings, the accurate and reliable generation of the building footprint from remote sensing imagery is still a challenging task. In this work, an end-to-end building footprint generation approach that integrates convolution neural network (CNN) and graph model is proposed. CNN serves as the feature extractor, while the graph model can take spatial correlation into consideration. Moreover, we propose to implement the feature pairwise conditional random field (FPCRF) as a graph model to preserve sharp boundaries and fine-grained segmentation. Experiments are conducted on four different datasets: (1) Planetscope satellite imagery of the cities of Munich, Paris, Rome, and Zurich; (2) ISPRS benchmark data from the city of Potsdam, (3) Dstl Kaggle dataset; and (4) Inria Aerial Image Labeling data of Austin, Chicago, Kitsap County, Western Tyrol, and Vienna. It is found that the proposed end-to-end building footprint generation framework with the FPCRF as the graph model can further improve the accuracy of building footprint generation by using only CNN, which is the current state-of-the-art.

Climate change and air pollution: the connection between traffic intervention policies and public acceptance in a local context

Urban mobility is the main source of air pollution in Europe and accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. In order to address this, a range of interventions and policies are being implemented across major European cities and studies in sustainable urban transport have proliferated. One such mitigation strategy involves redesigning urban form through ‘hard’ traffic policies, with a view of decreasing emission levels and therefore mitigating the effects of air pollution and climate change. However, efforts to assess public response to such interventions and the effectiveness of policy instruments in promoting sustainable travel in cities remain sparse. The city of Potsdam, Germany implemented a trial traffic measure aimed at reducing motorized traffic and promoting the use of bicycles and public transport systems. This study analysed data from 3553 survey participants who responded to a survey conducted prior to the implementation of the traffic measure. We aimed to identify mobility behaviours and underlying attitudes within the context of a ‘hard’ policy instrument, in order to obtain insight into the opportunities to more effectively define policy priorities that improve air quality and upscale climate mitigation. An exploratory cluster analysis identified four groups, characterised by mobility habits, their attitudes towards the measure, and general level of environmental concern. By identifying and understanding the differing attitudes and perceptions across population groups we are able to highlight group-specific barriers and opportunities, as well as potential transition pathways to encourage more sustainable transportation use. This study exemplifies how context can help to further shape mobility group typologies, identify policy-related priorities useful for decision-makers and assess the feasibility of policy instruments to facilitate a transformation towards more sustainable cities.

A Framework for the Long-term Monitoring of Urban Green Volume Based on Multi-temporal and Multi-sensoral Remote Sensing Data

Green urban infrastructure is of key importance for many aspects of urban life and urban planning. Valid and comprehensive databases with very high spatial and temporal resolution are needed to monitor changes and to detect negative trends. This paper presents an approach to assess urban indicators such as green volume and soil sealing with very high accuracy and based on a wide range of different sensors (aerial stereo images, QuickBird, WorldView 2 and 3, Sentinel 2, HRSC, LIDAR). A framework using regression tree methods was developed and successfully applied in a case study (the city of Potsdam, Germany) resulting in a long time series dating back 25 years. The methodology offers the opportunity to analyze urban development in detail and to understand the functional relationships of urban planning processes. Demands for effective climate change adaptation, especially in terms of reducing heat stress, can thus be better defined.

Fusion of deep learning with adaptive bilateral filter for building outline extraction from remote sensing imagery

Solving the problem of building extraction from remote sensing images, which have high spatial resolution, is considered to be one of the most challenging issues in the field of photogrammetry science and remote sensing. The purpose of this study is to present an innovative algorithm, named adaptive bilateral filter (ABF) + segment-based neural network, which is based on the fusion of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and adaptive ABF and has resulted in improvements in the accuracy of building extraction from remote sensing images with high spatial resolution. The building extraction process in this study includes the following steps: applying the ABF to the research data set and optimizing its parameters in order to improve the building outlines, designing, and training the DCNN, SegNet, based on the improved data set and optimizing it using an adaptive moment estimation algorithm and assessing the impact of applying the ABF + SegNet algorithm to automatic building outline extraction. The proposed algorithm in this study is tested on three sets of remote sensing data from the cities of Potsdam, Indianapolis, and Tehran. The results indicate that the ABF + SegNet algorithm is able to extract the buildings from remote sensing color images with suitable accuracy.

Arctic in the Anthropocene: sustainability in a new polar age

The Arctic provides one of the most striking signatures of climate change impacts. Accelerated loss of sea ice extent and thickness, loss in biodiversity, changing atmospheric circulation patterns, and melting permafrost portray only a few aspects of a rapidly changing Arctic. In recognition of the inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary (Keil 2015) discussions, tools, mechanisms, and implementation strategies necessary to address these challenging and pervasive issues of this century, the first Potsdam Summer School, entitled ‘Arctic in the Anthropocene’, took place in June–July, 2014. The summer school was coordinated by the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and the University of Potsdam, in conjunction with the city of Potsdam. The principal vision of the summer school was to eliminate disciplinary language barriers, and to foster communication amongst individuals trained in law and international relations, public health, and science, with the goal of extending an integrated science-policy dialogue for the benefit of humanity, the planet that we inhabit, and for which we share a collective responsibility.

The City of Potsdam: Between Privatization and Remunicipalization – Local Experiences and General Aspects on the Road to Publicization

Like many other municipalities, the city of Potsdam privatized its water supply and sewage disposal services in the 1990s.To achieve this, the capital city of the state of Brandenburg entered into a public private partnership with a globally operating investor. After just two years, however, Potsdam terminated the partnership and remunicipalized the services that had been privatized. Potsdam is thus a particularly early example of the paradigm shift away from privatization and towards remunicipalization. It also provides an instructive example for illustrating general remunicipalization phenomena and problems which go beyond local experiences. This involves, firstly, the empirical findings relating to scenarios in which remunicipalization takes place, which can today be observed in many municipal spheres of activity, including outside of Germany. Secondly, it involves a legal analysis of the causes, motives and goals of remunicipalization, and the forms in which it appears. It becomes apparent that privatization and remunicipalization are complementary strategies for the modernization of the Gemeinwesen (community, res publica). They both demand an analysis of the widest possible spectrum of organizational forms and courses of action which enable modern, efficient and optimal performance of tasks by the relevant stakeholders. What remains notably underdeveloped are the drafting of administrative cooperation contracts and organizational forms in the third sector, such as cooperatives. Finally, the overall analysis reveals, thirdly, that remunicipalization is only one aspect of a more comprehensive publicization and represents the rediscovery of the public. Wie viele andere Kommunen hat die Stadt Potsdam in den 1990er Jahren die Wasserversorgung und Abwasserentsorgung privatisiert. Dazu gründete die brandenburgische Landeshauptstadt eine Öffentlich Private Partnerschaft mit einem weltweit agierenden privaten Investor. Nach nur zwei Jahren hat Potsdam diese Partnerschaft allerdings wieder beendet und die privatisierten Aufgaben rekommunalisiert. Damit ist Potsdam ein besonders frühes Beispiel für den Paradigmenwechsel weg von der Privatisierung hin zur Rekommunalisierung. Zugleich handelt es sich um einen instruktiven Referenzfall, an dem sich über die lokalen Erfahrungen hinaus allgemeinere Rekommunalisierungsphänomene und -probleme veranschaulichen lassen. Das betrifft, erstens, die empirischen Befunde zu Rekommunalisierungsszenarien, die heute nicht nur deutschlandweit in vielen kommunalen Handlungsfeldern zu beobachten sind. Zweitens geht es um die rechtsdogmatische Analyse der Ursachen, Motive, Ziele und typologischen Erscheinungsformen von Rekommunalisierungen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass Privatisierung und Rekommunalisierung komplementäre Strategien zur Modernisierung des Gemeinwesens (res publica) sind. Sie fordern die Aufbereitung eines möglichst breiten Spektrums an Organisations- und Handlungsoptionen, die den Akteuren eine zeitgemäße, effiziente und optimale Erfüllung ihrer Aufgaben ermöglicht. Noch immer unterbelichtet sind insbesondere die Gestaltung vonVerwaltungskooperationsverträgen und Organisationsformen des Dritten Sektors wie die Genossenschaften. Schließlich ergibt die Gesamtanalyse drittens, dass Rekommunalisierungen und Reetatisierungen nur Teilaspekte einer umfassenderen Publizisierung sind, die als Chiffre für die Wiederentdeckung des Öffentlichen steht.

Civil Society from the Underground

In the 1980s, the “red border town,” as Potsdam was called then, was a center of the East German left-wing punk and skinhead movement; as a countermovement it soon became a location for right-wing extremist violence and counter-violence. To confront right-wing organizing, Antifa groups were established in Potsdam and other towns nearby, bringing the taboo topic of neo-Nazism as a social problem to the public’s attention. Initially, the SED state tried to downplay the confrontations as typical conflicts between youth groups; however, the newly founded Antifa groups were openly criminalized from the start. This course of action led to protests by both the left-wing alternative scene and the political civil rights movement. In memorandums and practical political actions, the Antifa groups fundamentally criticized the state, its failure to mold a socialist people, its militarization of society, and the state-enforced consensus of silence. In 1989, this critical approach became a part of the revolutionary, pro-democratic protest and reform movement, and Potsdam’s anti-Nazi League itself became an active factor of local revolutionary upheaval, a factor that has been largely ignored by research as well as memorial culture. This article uses the city of Potsdam as an example of how communication—a democratic process in itself—between subcultures and information transfer occurred between the center and periphery, that is, socialist capital, district town and surroundings. In addition, the article will also analyze the Antifa movement as a political and urban phenomenon of town environments and follows the question as to which locations the confrontations arose and why.

«Governance for Sustainability» und die Zone der Wissenstransaktionen

Abstract The integration and intertwinement of knowledge and politics have entered a new level due to the complex and dynamic developments in our current knowledge-based society. New transaction zones can be detected where especially knowledge of experts and scientists have gained a decisive role. At the same time, scientific expert knowledge integrates not always other relevant knowledge forms in productive manners. Based on this observation, the paper discusses insights from a study on the implementation of the recent European Air Quality Framework Directive (96/92/EC) on the issue of particulate matter (PM10) in the City of Potsdam. In this specific case city, officials were obliged to introduce a novel policy of local air quality management and assessment—induced by a knowledge-driven, externally imposed meta governance. In distinguishing different knowledge forms our study reveals the increasing dominance of scientific and expert knowledge in hierarchical governance arrangements and demonstrates how ...

Determination of Geno- and Cytotoxicity of Groundwater and Sediments Using the Recombinant SWITCH Test*

The recombinant Salmonella typhimurium TA1535 strain carrying the SWITCH plasmid (combined construct of the SOS-Lux plasmid pPLS-1 and the LAC-Fluoro plasmid pGFPuv: pSWITCH) was treated with control substances for genotoxic (2-aminoanthracene) and cytotoxic (aureomycin) potency as well as with 18 environmental samples (groundwater, river water, sediments) provided at the SENSPOL Technical Meeting on Problems Related to Diffuse Pollution Sources (Characterization of Sediment, Dredged Material, and Groundwater) organized by the Federal Institute of Hydrology in Koblenz, Germany, during late October 2003. For metabolic activation the samples were treated with S9 mix (5% S9 fraction in cofactor mix, Aroclor 1254-induced rat liver microsomes, Moltox Inc., Mol, Belgium). Simultaneously determined cytotoxicity and genotoxicity data were derived through the Multilabel Counter 1420 Victor2 (PerkinElmer, Boston, MA, USA), by sequential measurement of luminescence, absorbance, and fluorescence. The newly designed SWITCH test, as it was applied at the Koblenz meeting, displays a comparable sensitivity for test samples with known cyto- and genotoxic potential. Groundwater samples from the wells at the former gas plant site Kiel Canal and the agricultural area at Niederwerth expressed neither genotoxic nor cytotoxic responses of the bacteria for both metabolic conditions (+/−S9). Spiked groundwater samples from the Niederwerth well BW1 and the Urmitz well U12 located on the river Rhine were identified to be positive in terms of genotoxicity for the direct and the metabolic approach. Samples from the lake Tiefer See in the city of Potsdam showed a reduction of GFPuv expression as an indication for cytotoxicity, while luminescence output of incubated bacteria remained unaffected. This reflects the well-known presence of contaminations (especially cyanides) in the lake sediment as well as in the acetonic extract. The results obtained at the SENSPOL Technical Meeting show the SWITCH test to be of major relevance not only for the analysis of chemicals under laboratory conditions but also for environmental samples polluted by diffuse industrial sources.