Building the future: Toolkit for sustainable urban planning
City planning sets the long-term framework and goals for the development of the built environment for the coming decades. The urban planners’ work is challenging, as they should be able to assess now how to build our future living environment and what it will be like. VTT has developed several supporting urban planning tools, which enable showing of the impacts of planning choices for decision-makers, residents and other stakeholders.
Mari Hukkalainen, Senior Specialist
The purpose of city planning is to set the general guidelines for construction and urban area development. They enable the development of a comfortable, efficient and environmentally friendly living environment. There are several stakeholder groups involved in urban planning, each with its own interests, opinions and perspectives. The urban planners’ role in the process is challenging, as they have to find compromises that will take account of the area’s special features and support ideal development of each area in an individual way. They should be able to estimate how the planning choices affect the area and what kind of consequences they will have on the area’s sustainable development throughout the whole life cycle. Several studies have concluded that the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required for mitigating climate change are finally made at a local level. City planning is one of the most important practical tools cities have for putting sustainable development goals into practice.
The choices made in the course of the city planning process affect, for example, buildings, housing and services, traffic, the choice of potential energy sources, and the general functionality and attractiveness of the living environment. Decisions need to be made regarding the placing of housing, services and workplaces, recreational areas, and promotion and provision of support for various modes of transport. Sufficiently dense urban structure enables a profitable public transport infrastructure, provision of neighbourhood services, and city’s energy system (e.g. district heating). The local city plan and its terms and conditions applied to plot transfer can include recommendations and offer incentives for planning and selecting eco-efficient solutions.
The energy efficiency requirements for buildings are becoming stricter, and by 2020, all new buildings must be nearly zero energy buildings in Finland. Successful city planning provides the best possible starting point for designing of nearly zero energy buildings. For example, aligning buildings southward facilitates efficient utilisation of solar panels and solar thermal collectors. Local traffic planning, on the other hand, takes a stand on which modes of transport the residents, workers and other local transport users choose in their everyday lives.
It is important that the choices made during the urban planning process are assessed and evaluated in the long term. Most often, the impacts of sustainable development are divided into environmental impacts, economic and social impacts. To support urban planning, VTT has developed the CityTuneTM toolkit (see the figure below), which can be customised to meet the needs of each specific customer and city. CityTuneTM consists of a large selection of assessment methods and tools, including: the Smart City Index suited for the assessment and benchmarking (The main results of the CityKEYS project), urban planning tools (Eco-calculator for city planning, KEKO), forecasting tool for the energy demand of built environment (Method for assessing energy efficiency potential and emission impacts in the building stock, REMA), energy planning and optimization tool (Results of the CITYOPT project), and APROS software for precise simulation of energy systems. This toolkit enables to assess the choices made in urban planning as accurately as needed. The results obtained make it easier for the city planners to explain the choices made and show their impacts to the decision-makers and the residents. In addition to the developed technical solutions and methods for assessing the environmental and economic impacts, VTT has also developed solutions for Living Labs supporting two-way communication between urban planners, decision-makers, residents and other users of an area. It seems that communication facilitates and accelerates the implementation of the urban planning process, which may be very time- and resource-consuming with several commenting rounds.
