Project CITYAM: Shaping the future of Urban Air Mobility

Published on 14.02.2024

Written by Jaanus Müür & Silver Sternfeldt, TalTech/FinEst Centre for Smart Cities

Project CITYAM aims to equip cities with tools to improve airspace management in dealing with emerging urban air mobility and scaling drone operations.

As drone technology continues to evolve, cities are exploring its potential to enhance urban infrastructure and services. However, integrating drones into urban environments requires careful planning and consideration of regulatory frameworks, landing site infrastructure, and use case feasibility.

FinEst Centre for Smart Cities together with Tallinn University of Technology’s Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance are participating in the project and leading the development of tools to analyse both the public acceptance and the readiness of cities in the context of adoption and usage of drones in urban airspace.

Public Acceptance Toolkit to engage citizens in Urban Air Mobility development

Urban Air Mobility Public Acceptance Toolkit is a valuable tool designed to foster public understanding and support for the transformative potential of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in cities. Developed through collaboration, the toolkit focuses on the social acceptance of various drone services in urban environments.

Urban Air Mobility is being deployed globally, and its successful integration requires engaging citizens early on. National and international institutions are working to keep pace with the rules and procedures that need to be established amidst these developments. Public engagement is crucial, considering concerns raised by the public. To help gather crucial data for city planning strategies, a toolkit assessing social acceptance of UAM has been developed.

Social acceptance of UAM gauges the willingness of communities to support the integration of aerial vehicles and accompanying infrastructure into urban transportation systems. Acceptance includes attitudes toward UAM technologies, considering factors like environmental impact, safety, privacy, visual and noise pollution, trust in technology and authorities, and perceived benefits.

The toolkit, adjusted from existing models of social acceptance, evaluates general acceptance of UAM and use-case-specific acceptance of drone services in leading cities. The toolkit is in English and is meant for municipalities or other UAM stakeholders to be translated into their native language for implementation.

Instructions are provided throughout the toolkit to foster the process from translating to survey rollout. The toolkit is modular and can be adjusted to address various circumstances cities might have when piloting their use cases.

The lead cities in CITYAM project are Hamburg, Stockholm and Helsinki, and they will translate and pilot the toolkit under the activity “Piloting use cases and landing sites” in the coming months in 2024. The toolkit in different languages and the results from different cities will be compared for finalisation and validation.

Assessing drone adoption readiness with an Evaluation Framework

The evaluation framework developed for the CITYAM project is based on the societal embeddedness evaluation framework (Geerdink et al. 2020) which has been adjusted to be suitable in the context of drones.

The evaluation framework builds on top of the technology readiness assessment framework and distinguishes four levels of societal embeddedness (SEL) of a technology:

SEL1 Exploration
SEL2 Development
SEL3 Demonstration
SEL4 Deployment

Societal embeddedness is assessed in each of the following four dimensions: Environment, Stakeholder Involvement, Policy & Regulations, and Market & Resources.

The evaluation framework has several roles in the CITYAM project.

First, it evaluates the readiness of each of the six partner cities to adopt drones. This is done with the help of four evaluation questionnaires, each of which focuses on one of the aforementioned dimensions. The questionnaire also functions as a checklist of activities that a city should implement to ensure that the adoption of drones considers wider societal concerns.

Second, the framework will be used to assess the impact of the CITYAM project on the partner cities. This will be done by carrying out the evaluation two times during the project: in spring 2024 and spring 2025. The evaluations will be compared, and lessons will be drawn up for further international scaling.

The societal embeddedness assessment framework adjusted to meet the CITYAM project requirements will be publicly available. Any city or municipality that wishes to assess its current readiness to adopt drones and monitor their progress can use the framework for that purpose.