Wolfgang Loibl

ICT enabled participatory urban planning and policy development: The UrbanAPI project

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present the effectiveness of participatory information and communication technology (ICT) tools for urban planning, in particular, supporting bottom-up decision-making in urban management and governance. Design/methodology/approach – This work begins with a presentation on the state of the art literature on the existing participatory approaches and their contribution to urban planning and the policymaking process. Furthermore, a case study, namely, the UrbanAPI project, is selected to identify new visualisation and simulation tools applied at different urban scales. These tools are applied in four different European cities – Vienna, Bologna, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Ruse – with the objective to identify the data needs for application development, commonalities in requirements of such participatory tools and their expected impact in policy and decision-making processes. Findings – The case study presents three planning applications: three-dimensional Virtual Reality at neig...

Long-term spatio-temporal social vulnerability variation considering health-related climate change parameters particularly affecting elderly

For assessing the social dimension of vulnerability, population exposure mapping is usually considered the essential starting point. Integration of social structure then further differentiates situation-specific vulnerability patterns on a local scale. Census data available in heterogeneous spatial reference units are still considered the standard information input for assessing potentially affected people, for example, in case of an emergency. There is a strong demand for population data in homogeneous spatial units that are independent from administrative areas. Raster representations meet this demand but are not yet available for all European countries. In this paper, we present an approach of spatial disaggregation of population data for a European transect referring to current population statistics and anticipated future prospects. Recently published data providing the degree of soil sealing are applied as basic proxy for population density in the spatial disaggregation model. In order to assess future patterns of climate change-related vulnerability, results of a European regional climate model are considered for projecting the situation in the 2030s. “Heat wave frequency” is accounted for as climate variable featuring conditions regarded as especially strenuous for elderly or physically weak persons. Integrated analysis of the population and climate prospects enables identification of hot spots in the European transect examined, that is, regions of particularly demanding projected climatic patterns as well as high population density and case-specific vulnerable structure (elderly people). Integrated and consistent spatial analyses on European scale are essential for decision support in the context of climate change impact mitigation as well as for risk communication and future safety and security considerations.

Rural–Urban Regions: A Spatial Approach to Define Urban–Rural Relationships in Europe

The previous chapter introduced the range of issues associated with the peri-urban, the subject of this book. The peri-urban as a specific morphological type was defined and the different dimensions of its dynamics were explored. This peri-urban zone is intimately associated with the transition from a dense urban structure to that of a rural character and since it also involves movements into, out of and across it from both these extremes, it is difficult to consider it properly without understanding the broader regional context and dynamics across the urban–rural gradient. Therefore, this chapter will focus on the broader context of urban–rural relationships. Based on recent scientific debates concerning the concept of functional regions and urban–rural relationships, both current and previous definitions and their political implementations are introduced before presenting a new typology to represent Rural–urban Regions (RUR) spatially. Covering the territory of European Union (EU), this typology classifies regions into different types, considering city size, degree of regional mono- and poly-centricity, as well as their urban, peri-urban or rural predominance. The development of the typology includes a further delineation of regions into urban, peri-urban and rural sub-regions, all based on land use patterns and population distribution and density. The typology was subsequently used throughout the PLUREL project and each of the case studies presented in Part Two refers to one of these types, although not all are represented there, since the case studies were unavoidably selected before the typology was developed.

Economic Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts

Executive Summary.- Introduction.- Part I: Cost on Opportunities of Climate Change at the European Level.- Part II: Evaluation at the National Level: Methodological Issues.- Part III: Fields of Impact.- Part IV: Aggregate Evaluation.

Climate twins - An attempt to quantify climatological similarities

As climate change appears, strategies and actions will be necessary to cope with its effects on environment and society in the coming decades. Current climate conditions can be observed everywhere in the world but future climate conditions can only be estimated through climate simulations which produce huge amounts of quantitative data. This data leads to statements like “temperature increase is expected to exceed 2.6°C” or similar and remain fuzzy to non-experts in climate research. The Climate Twins application is designed to communicate climate changes in an intuitive and understandable way by showing regions which have now similar climate conditions according to a given Point of Interest (POI) in the future. This paper explains how the application seeks for locations with similar climatological patterns according to the POI. To achieve this goal a method has been developed to quantify similarity between two locations’ climate data.

GEOLAND spatial planning observatory: How remote sensing data can serve the needs of urban and regional planning

The objective of the geoland is to develop and demonstrate reliable, affordable and cost efficient European geo-information services, supporting the implementation of European directives and their national, regional and local implementation, as well as European and international policies. The observatory for spatial planning (OSP) generates products and services based on earth observation (EO) data, other geo-spatial as well as socioeconomic data contributing to the information needs of spatial planning. In this paper we will focus on presenting the results of the two first years of geoland OSP, namely indicators and urban growth scenarios and on analysing their usefulness in regional and urban planning. The process of calculating indicators on the basis of combining earth observation data with socio-economic data has been carried out at three levels: European level, national/transnational level and subnational level. The indicators are linked to urban issues, urban-rural interaction and environmental topics. In addition to making the spatial data more useful for users e.g. urban and regional planners, the indicators have been developed and calculated following fully scientific criteria. Many of the developed indicators have been devised bearing in mind issues linked to various aspects of sustainable development. Landscape fragmentation, access to green urban areas and degree of urban sprawl yield useful information for planners about the present state of the environment and if the direction of the development is towards a more sustainable future or not. Urban planning is very future oriented task. Most available tools such as indicators are linked to past and present. There is a clear need for development and testing of models which would help urban and regional planners to simulate in an easy and reliable way the future development of the city and more over what kinds of impacts different development scenarios induce. In order to bridge this gap geoland spatial observatory has done various tests with two types of land use models: settlement growth model and cellular automata model. Both models have proved to produce reliable simulations for urban land use changes. Urban and regional planners participating in the project are convinced about the added value these types of models can provide with both in the planning process and in political decision-making.

Shared-Socio-Economic Pathways

Socio-economic pathways determine future climate impacts and costs thereof. Pragmatically, we have referred to a global reference socio-economic pathway (represented by SSP2 in the IPCC process) and derived figures for the core economic, demographic, land-use and (qualitatively) technological development in Austria, which again frame the sectoral development assumptions necessary to follow a scenario-based cost assessment approach.

Modelling Micro-climate Characteristics for Urban Planning and Building Design

Climate sensitive urban planning and building design require detailed information on effects of a changing climate. To simulate thermal building performance appropriate data are required as “standardized weather files”. But as historic weather records cannot be used to model building performance for future climate, synthetic “future weather” data are necessary. Here we present the steps to derive such data for the urban development project “Seestadt Aspern” in Vienna. We start with regional climate simulations with 10x10 km grid spacing, where hourly data for years of current and future climate have been extracted for the Aspern area. Micro-scale simulations at 5m-resolution have been carried out to consider local influences on urban micro-climate, taking regional simulation results as framework condition. As micro-simulation results are delivered only for single days, transfer functions have been developed to generate synthetic weather records, turning hourly regional climate simulation results into local climate characteristics.

Requirements for data management and maintenance to support regional land use research

SENSOR is dependent on sufficient reliable and accurate data that have to be provided and shared by the partners within the project. Access to reliable and harmonised data across Europe is a fundamental precondition for realisation of the SENSOR project. The current chapter describes basics concerning geo-spatial data types and formats, system architecture and database technologies, interoperability standards, including the INSPIRE principles, data warehouse and GeoPortal technologies. Further some information on spatial data mining, on data policies and related legal aspects and the SENSOR approach for spatial data handling are provided.

Multi-Actor Urban Energy Planning Support: Building refurbishment & Building-integrated Solar PV

Energy strategies are needed at a city level and consequently, adequate planning tools are required to support urban energy planners in assessing their decisions (e.g. which buildings are the best to refurbish). This paper presents an ontology based approach for urban energy planning support. The approach is applied to develop a planning support system for building-refurbishment and building-integrated Photovoltaics-based energy generation. The adopted methodology works as an iterative, incremental process, where each iteration leads to the integration of a new planning decision. The process starts by the identification of the actors whose interests are affected by the decision, then developing/re-using computation models that provide answers for their questions. Different models are integrated using an ontology that represents the parts of the city that are within the scope of the questions to be answered. The system is applied within a district in the city of Vienna covering around 1200 buildings. The adopted approach provides different actors with specific information related to their view point of decision making. Further, the output is aggregated to a common level of abstraction, to be understood by all involved actors. This approach is applicable to different cities, as the ontology also integrates extension and upgrade mechanisms that provide flexibility to cope with different available data collections.