Digital urban form models for a strengthened urban planning practice: resource-efficient, sustainable and equal spatial planning

Research Project, 2024 – 2027

By their planning monopoly, Swedish municipalities are responsible, with due recognition of national interests, to decide and plan the future use of land in Sweden.This constitutes an exceptional creation of value by spatially structuring almost all other activities in Swedish society, not least people’s everyday life.
By their planning monopoly, Swedish municipalities are responsible, with due recognition of national interests, to decide and plan the future use of land in Sweden. This constitutes an exceptional creation of value by spatially structuring almost all other activities in Swedish society, not least people’s everyday life. It is also essential in setting the framework for most action taken towards sustainability goals.Recent years has seen decisive development in research, not least due to digitalization, when it comes to improving the understanding of the complex entity constituted by the built environment. New digital models facilitate more advanced analysis, more knowledge intense work methods, and thereby improved decision support, better capturing the complex interplay between buildings, open space and green structures. Essential is the improved potentials to capture the relation between the different elements constituting the built environment and how they influence each other, which is key for the development of high-quality life environments and to reach sustainability goals.The project comprises six municipalities (Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Norrköping, Eskilstuna and Östersund) as well as research groups at KTH and Chalmers. These municipalities are all in the forefront of applying this new knowledge as well as digitally planning process in general and have over a long time had close collaboration with research in urban planning and design at KTH and Chalmers. This has taken the form of large educational commissions, development of work processes, and advice in concrete planning projects. An informal network among professionals and researchers has over time developed, where the need to formalize and accelerate this knowledge exchange has become apparent. This project therefore want to establish a foundation for its future work with the aim to also spread this development to other municipalities where we already see great interest.Hence, the project aims to:through active collaboration within practice and between practice and research develop new ways or working in practice that make better use of the potentials for knowledge development that digitalization offers, and to form a robust and acknowledged professional level for this practice,facilitate a systematic and continuous process of exchange and learning between the six municipalities in the project, all taking lead in the development of digital urban form models, thereby also breaking the ground for other Swedish municipalities,contribute to a close collaboration between research and practice bringing the latest knowledge development into practice, but also to support learning within research from the extensive experience in practice of concrete application.The objective of the project is to formalize and accelerate momentum in the already present knowledge exchange between practice and research in the development and application of digital models of urban form and create robust standards and routines for practice in municipalities when it comes to analysis, interpretation and working methods in relation to such models. Key is the creation of standards for the models data management; formalization of common base analyses; and to establish a professional quality norm when it comes to interpretation of analytic results and simulations.Besides the establishment of this spearhead network for knowledge development and its potential for spread of knowledge to other municipalities, the project will result in two concrete products:a handbook that collects descriptions of how to construct such digital models, its data management, how to conduct typical forms of analyses, how to interpret their results, and finally describe how they enter typical and reoccurring work processes in municipal planning.a data base of high-quality digital base models, following the principles outlined in the handbook, as a means to secure quality and facilitate reproducibility, which also in