Building resilience by visualizing and mapping resources

A new toolkit provides key steps towards urban resilience

Thanks to a new toolkit from Sweco, which combines various digital tools, cities could build resilience by visualizing and mapping everything from resources and climate risks to an urban development’s carbon emissions, its impact on the Sustainable Development Goals and alignment with green investment criteria, e.g., the EU taxonomy.

The new toolkit support cities and urban planners to map and visualise resources in the built environment, to support adaptation to climate change, secure the neighbourhoods local resources and reduce carbon emission. With the toolkit, cities can accelerate towards a climate positive and resilient city planning, by making it easier for them to monitor their climate budget.

“The current multiple challenges, accelerating climate change, a high pace of digitization, a growing population, loss of biodiversity, has accelerated new approaches to complex urban planning through the aid of digital tools”, says Elise Grosse, Head of Sustainability for Architects, Sweco.

Resilience is about a system’s ability to adapt to the changing surroundings, changing markets, and changing circumstances. To be resilient the city must overview multiple values. Besides monetary ones, these also include carbon, energy, climate risks, circularity, biodiversity, social value creation

For the city to become resilient as a system, this requires a good understanding of how to plan for resourceful neighborhoods as the world is changing. A balance of resources can be greatly supported through well-planned, designed, and managed urban environments and communities.

Starting at the neighbourhood level, resources can be circulated or shared, and can be provided as local alternatives in case of disruptions in supply chain, mitigating external pressures, while providing economic benefits and innovative business models.

Urban Insight by Sweco, towards sustainable development

Methods for climate resilient city planning – key steps to keeping the climate budget

Different neighbourhood design scenarios generate different carbon emissions, from the embodied carbon of materials, operational energy, and type of mobility.

Thanks to this toolkit by Sweco, that combines a set of digital tools, the carbon emissions of a neighbourhood´s design as well as material investment costs are visualised. This offers a way for planners to understand already in the early phase when a design exceeds a city’s carbon budget, which makes it cost efficient to adapt strategies. It also enables the various stakeholders of the cities to build resilience together, as the visualization on system level in combination with dialogue methods, supports decision making when identifying resources, their emissions, and the effect of different climate adaptation strategies.

The digital methods can help to provide risk and impact assessments, by telling us more about a neighbourhood’s local resources and their impact on carbon emissions, providing developers the opportunity to make the most optimal design choices for meeting climate goals.

Digital tools help to identify potential synergies among different resources and solutions on a system level. The visualisation making complex systems easy to overview and facilitate cooperation among stakeholders, decision making support for climate governance, and encouraging innovative business models.

Sustainability sun laptop

Examples of tools to assess climate risks, carbon and costs

The new toolkit and its method are platform-independent and work together with different digital GIS and 3D tools on the market.

The toolkit provides a powerful methodology, for example by:

  • The Symbio City method, focused on involving the right stakeholders in a dialogue and decision-making, identifying urban design solutions based on different scenarios and their outcome.
  • The Sustainability Sun, visualising the projects and the developments effect on the SDG targets.
  • Carbon Cost Compass is a digital service that provides construction- and property developers the opportunity to make the most optimal design choices for climate and economically sustainable buildings.
  • Futureproofed is a pioneer in developing and marketing carbon management tools. More than 200 cities and companies work on Futureproofed’s SaaS platform (Software-as-a-Service) to measure, reduce and report CO2 emissions.

“Visualisation are important. The Symbio City method and the Sustainability Sun are about seeing the city as a system of resources and identify the values that we want to achieve. With Sweco´s C3, Carbon Cost Compass Tool, as a basis, we can early on estimate carbon emissions from buildings, even count each single nut and bolt, and then project those values, on a city scale C3 for cities,” Elise Grosse explains.“In combination with the tool Futureproof, we can also monitor the carbon budget of a city’s other operations.”

There is a growing demand for digital services, such as data processing, dashboards and monitoring tools, to complement design and engineering work. With the new toolkit Sweco offer clients added value in terms of digital solutions that scale up and accelerate the climate transition.

Futureproofed

Cities could today be better equipped technically, and with the right tools to secure resources and take action to reduce carbon emissions.

Cities are taking action to reduce their carbon footprint

Trelleborg Municipality in Sweden are using parts of the toolkit to develop and transform its old harbour into a housing area, Sjöstaden.

New approach to urban planning. Through the Symbio City scenario-methodology focusing on stakeholder dialogue, a shared vision for the neighbourhood was co-created by stakeholders and urban planning experts. By forecasting different scenarios, they identified values and solutions for becoming more resilient, while taking the city’s local resources, urban capacities, and opportunities in the region into account.

With the Sustainability Sun tool, the impact the development would have on the SDGs was discussed, evaluated, and prioritised. The planning was also aligned with the framework of the EU taxonomy to ensure compliance with green financing.

For the coming phase, the carbon cost of different architectural and urban design scenarios will be visualised in the 3D GIS model.

“By connecting data and visualize it within a 3D model of the city, we can test scenarios of the future at minimal cost. We can use digital tools to assess climate risks and see what kind of effects different preventative measures will have in achieving more resilience” says Gunilla Wembe, architect and project leader at Sweco for Sjöstaden.

Additional complexity will be introduced by adding carbon emission from different mobility scenarios, the mix of operations in buildings and their various energy demands, and climate mitigation of landscape designs alternatives.

“Planning for a climate positive neighbourhood, and secure climate adaption is a challenging task, but we have to face up to the challenge. The new methods using digital tools, support us in navigating that complexity”, says Mårten Olsson, Head of Growth at Trelleborg community.

There are many important resources and resource management issues in a city, not just the obvious ones such as buildings, energy, waste, or mobility, but also public spaces, blue and green infrastructure, and other social meeting places that contribute to a sense of well-being in the city.

As an architect, I believe that an attractive city creates resilience on a personal level. In an attractive surrounding, we connect easier with each other and take better care of the environment, which in turn makes people feel safer and happier.” Grosse explains.

 

Elise Grosse works at the forefront of development for the sustainable built environment at the Architects division for Sweco in Sweden. She holds a master’s degree in architecture, is a certified Building Biologist IBN and is currently studying towards a PhD in multi-disciplinary co-creation. Elise has international professional experience from Dominica, Germany and the U.S. and an extensive global network. With her ingenuity, initiative skills, and strong belief in collaboration for a more sustainable world, she has become an expert in facilitating teams in developing new partnerships for a sustainable built environment, innovative solutions, and business propositions through co-creation among stakeholders with different perspectives. She is passionate about the interaction between digital tools and group creativity (collective intelligence) and is convinced that such approaches can solve our common existential challenges.

 

Gunilla Wembe, Business developer in urban planning at Sweco Architects.Gunilla Wembe works as a business developer in urban planning at the Architects division for Sweco in Sweden. She has a Master´s degree in architecture. Gunilla is a driving force in complex, urban architectural projects. With her long experience and ability to seize the initiative, she believes strongly in creating the architecture of the future working in cross-sectoral collaboration with colleagues and other specialists. Her focus is on creating holistic, safe and sustainable environments, which are attractive and comfortable for people to live in. Gunilla is a process leader in sustainable and social-group dialogues. She frequently uses Swecos smart digital tools such as Sustainability Sun, as well as the EU-taxonomy, C3 Building and C3 City in order to help our customers design and carry out their projects.