Rooting for sustainable smart cities: Designing smart irrigation for urban green spaces

Climate change has disrupted the global water cycle, exposing hundreds of millions of people to unprecedented hydrological conditions. As water scarcity grows, urban green spaces increasingly struggle to regulate micro-climates, a key factor in maintaining liveable cities. Thus, smart city initiatives increasingly turn to digital solutions to conserve scarce resources, and smart, sustainable irrigation systems offer a promising approach. This study employs an Action Design Research approach to design and evaluate such a decision support system for urban green spaces, in close collaboration with the city of Frankfurt am Main, its urban green spaces department, and the botanical garden, which are responsible for irrigating 8000 young trees and 3800 shrubs. Combining theoretical foundations with practitioner insights from city administrators, smart city specialists, and botanists, the study shows how IoT-based soil moisture sensing and data analytics enable demand-oriented, resource-efficient irrigation. The work generates design knowledge contributions in the form of problem statements, design requirements, design features, and design principles, as well as a software prototype.