SENSARE

SENSARE is a Berlin smart city project that develops and deploys sensor-based monitoring systems to enhance urban living conditions, environmental quality, and infrastructure management across the city. The project focuses on creating a network of IoT sensors that collect real-time data on key urban parameters including air quality, noise levels, temperature, humidity, traffic flows, and public space utilisation. By providing continuous, granular measurements at the neighbourhood and street level, SENSARE generates the detailed urban data that is essential for evidence-based decision-making in city planning, environmental protection, and public health. The sensor infrastructure uses low-power, cost-effective devices connected via LoRaWAN and other IoT communication protocols, enabling dense deployment across Berlin's diverse urban environments without requiring expensive wired infrastructure. Data collected by the sensor network is processed, visualised, and made available through Berlin's urban data platform, where it can be accessed by municipal departments, researchers, businesses, and citizens for a wide range of applications. Use cases include identifying air pollution hotspots for targeted intervention, monitoring construction noise compliance, optimising street cleaning schedules based on actual usage patterns, tracking urban heat island effects to inform climate adaptation planning, and providing real-time environmental information to residents through public dashboards and mobile applications. SENSARE also explores the ethical and governance dimensions of urban sensing, developing privacy-preserving data collection methods and transparent data usage policies that maintain public trust. The project aligns with Berlin's Gemeinsam Digital smart city strategy and its commitment to open, responsible, and data-driven urban governance. It contributes to European initiatives on urban data spaces and provides a scalable model for sensor-based urban intelligence that other cities can adapt to their own contexts and priorities.