Urban Development and Infrastructure Cost Modelling for Managing Urban Growth in Latin American Cities

Rapid urban growth presents considerable challenges to cities in Latin America and calls for tools and mechanisms that can help identify priority areas of work and enable integrated responses for urban sustainability, especially with regard to access and delivery of infrastructure services. The concentration of population, however, generates high demand for services. When the expansion of the supply of services is inadequate, significant deficits emerge in the coverage and quality of infrastructure and services, including housing. These problems are compounded by weak urban governance. (IDB, 2015) Thus solutions are required to secure sustainable urban development considering financing limits of cities authorities as well quality of life and environment. Infrastructure planning can either respond to urban growth providing supply by following the demand or it can pro-actively shape urban development in a resource efficient way by providing supply directing the demand. Thus appropriate infrastructure design can serve as an instrument for “soft” urban growth management. AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology) has been contracted by the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) to develop a tool (model) to simulate urban expansion triggered by infrastructure development and to estimate related infrastructure costs. The tool allows simulating different urban development scenarios based on different assumption on population behaviour and criteria triggering this behaviour. The tool called UIDS (Urban and Infrastructure Development Simulator) allows testing infrastructure networks extensions and estimates the expected infrastructure costs to assist cities in resource efficient as well as cost efficient infrastructure design. Backbone of the tool is a spatially explicit micro-simulation of urban expansion conducted through an agent-based model (ABM) as well as AIT’s MASGISmo simulation platform making use of the RePastJ environment for ABM modeling and R-statistics as well as a PostgreSQL/PostGis database and a GeoServer for Web Map Services (WMS). Single agents representing households of different socioeconomic classes trigger land cover and land use change within an area by moving to certain places. To model dwelling suitability for the agent classes the urban-region landscape is described through attractiveness layers representing different characteristics increasing (or decreasing) the suitability of potential urban expansion areas. The additional infrastructure costs for road network, water- and sanitation network, electricity and gas network, are estimated based on costs per unit (e.g. km pipeline, area covered etc.) and the related supply ratio. Based on the new dwelling allocations the infrastructure costs related to water and sanitation, transportation, and energy are calculated as distribution and connection costs and aggregated to total costs for the city, which are compared between different urban development scenarios

Urban Development Simulator: An interactive decision support tool for urban planners enabling citizen’s participation.

The Urban Development Simulator is currently under development within the FP7 EU project urbanAPI (2011-2014). The simulation tool is developed for the city of Ruse in remote northern Bulgaria at the Romanian border as a support for the local urban planners and politicians to evaluate high level planning decisions defined as use cases. The tool is developed as generic simulation framework, thus the framework can be applied for other cities too, to generate tailor-made urban planning support tools, if the necessary geospatial data about future planning scenarios and related statistical data describing the socio-economic state and future expectations are available. The tool enables urban planners to estimate the impact of different urban development scenarios and visualises spatial changes through dynamic GIS maps depicting the results of the simulations. It is based on the analysis of geospatial data and uses an Agent-based modelling approach to simulate the development in the city. While other urban development simulation tools usually model urban growth in the urban fringe, the Urban Development Simulator concentrates on intra-urban development, as the City of Ruse turns out as a shrinking city which is starting to recover since the last years – reorganizing the intra-urban structure. The tool has a complex user interface and a web interfaces to interact with the local citizens. Thus different planning scenarios and their effects can be visualized (also in 3D) via the web interface and the opinion of the local residents can be involved into the planning decisions by voting for selected planning decisions as preference of the citizens. The spatial pattern of the preferences serves as an input for the parameterization of the Agent-based model to simulate the development trends within the different areas of the city. Scenarios can be simulated what would be, if the urban planners would follow the citizens’ preferences. This enables the decision makers to adapt their urban development plans by considering the preferences of the citizens. Effects on e.g. the final energy demand and CO2 emissions for residential buildings are further calculated for the different development scenarios. The model runs as a Java web-start application and is hosted on a server at the AIT with remote access for the Ruse users. For the model development the simulation platform MASGISmo (Multimethod Agent-based (ABM) System dynamics (SD), GIS modelling platform) has been applied, a framework originally developed during several prior projects to combine a bottom up agent-based simulation method (ABM) with a top down – system dynamics (SD) approach. This platform is programmed in Java connected to several external tools as a PostgreSQL (PostGIS) database, Vensim a (SD) tool and uses RepastJ as core ABM tool. For the purpose of the Urban Development Simulator the GIS capability of the platform was enhanced with more powerful GIS features, thus new planning scenarios can directly be introduced within the tool by the urban planners. The paper will concentrate on the description of the structure of the Urban Development Simulator, further more explain the participatory citizen’s integration

Photovoltaik für Elektromobilität – eine GIS-gestützte Analyse zur Identifizierung und Bewertung des Photovoltaikpotenzials auf städtischen Freiflächen zur Versorgung von Ladeinfrastrukturen für Elektrofahrzeuge

Urbane Freiflächen wie Straßenräume, Großparkplätze oder Erholungsflächen bieten ein bislang wenig genutztes Potenzial für die Implementierung von Photovoltaikanlagen.Das Projekt Syn[En]ergy1 (Zeitraum Februar 2016 bis Jänner 2018), durchgeführt vom Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, der Universität für Bodenkultur Wien (BOKU) und Nikko Photovoltaik GmbH, verfolgt die Erforschung von Synergien zwischeneiner Photovoltaiknutzung auf horizontalen Stadtflächen und anderen Nutzungsansprüchen als Grundlage für eine nachhaltige Energieerzeugung. Dazuwurden Energieproduktionspotenziale unter Berücksichtigunglokaler Standortsspezifika für die Untersuchungsgebiete Wien und Korneuburg abgeschätzt und darauf aufbauend ökonomisch effiziente und sozial akzeptierte Anwendungsszenarien für einzelne Standorte entwickelt. In dieser Arbeitwerden, als kleiner Teil von Syn[En]ergy, verschiedene Anwendungsszenarien für zukünftige Implementierungen von PV in Städten zur Unterstützung der E-Mobilität (E-Bikes) dargestellt undwesentliche Barrieren und Herausforderungenaufgezeigt, um diesesPV-Potenzial inurbanen Räumen nutzen zu können.Es wurde eine PV-Potenzial-Analyse für existierende Citybike-Stationen in Wien durchgeführt, die eine allgemeine ökonomische Analyse beinhaltet und für ausgewählte Stationen Szenarios vergleicht. Zusätzlich wird kurz erläutert, wie Standorte für zukünftige Stationen unter der Berücksichtigung des vorhandenen PV-Potenzialsgefunden werden könnten

Integrated Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Causal Urban Food-Water-Energy Relations towards more Climate-Resilient Cities

Currently, the world is facing great challenges in terms of securing water, energy and food for all. With continuous increase in urbanisation and and changed lifestyles, the demand within the three sectors food, water and energy (FWE) in cities is increasing as well (Sukhwani et al., 2019). Due to the limited availability of natural resources, the pressure on urban land use is equally increased, thus more attention needs to be given to sustainability and resource efficiency. Furthermore, climate change and the related increasedfrequency of extreme weather events such as stormwater events and/or dry periods pose additional challenges for infrastructure and (agricultural) land use as well as for the quality of life. These challenges call for more systemic, integrated and cross-sectoral approaches helping to build resilient urban systems. These approaches should focus more on a holistic urban system transformation, rather than tackling problems within one sector. Thus, the main goal of reaching a sustainable future should be to create integrated, informed and well-coordinated interventions to support cities to become more climate resilient. As a response to the problem setting, the concept of FWE Nexus emerged. The Nexus describes and analyses the interlinkages between the three sectors, with the goal to identify potential synergies and minimise trade-offs between the three sectors (Hoff, 2011). The paper discusses a number of methods on how to describe the FWE system: Firstly, to show how different elements in the entire FWE system are interrelated and to create a common system view among the involved stakeholders, a qualitative system analysis, has been carried out. This qualitative system analysis enables experts (from FWE sectors, city authorities, urban planners) to understand the causal relations and the feedbacks between the system elements. Thus, to cope with the challenges and system immanent drivers, a basis for the discussion and development of strategies is established. The qualitative analysis was also used to gain a specific view on the differences between different case study regions. Secondly, based on this qualitative analysis, a more specific quantitative GIS-based analysis of land use changes and resulting water demand has been performed as input for a simulation model. This model will be used to analyse the impacts of spatial planning scenarios for the sustainable resources management and shall support urban planners to create more resilient cities and regions

Gender-Sensitive Use and Development of (Digital) Participation and Analysis Tools for Equal Access to Open Spaces

In view of the growing threat posed by the effects of climate change on cities and regions, politicians and the public administration are increasingly called upon to create environmentally and climate-friendly as well as just framework conditions in urban spaces (IPCC 2022). The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined that urban green infrastructuresnot only benefit biodiversity, but arealso socially significant. In addition to providing a range of ecosystem services (MEA 2005), they equally support the diverse usability of urban landscapes, thus affirming the right to the (climate-just) city for all (Heindl 2022). Especially in denser settlement areas, where green and open spaces with important social and recreational functions are only available to a limited extent, different, sometimes contradictory needs of diverse social groups can lead to conflicts of use. Thereby, “vulnerable” persons or groups1, who on average already have less access to high-quality green and open spaces anyway (Honey-Rosés et al. 2020), often give way to the more dominant user groups. In this context, approaches such as gender-sensitive planning and design (Terraza et al. 2020, Tummers et al. 2019) as well as attempts to design and manage public spaces sensitively according todiverse everydayneeds of the heterogenous urban populationare becoming increasingly important. The research project "DraussenDaheim"2(DDH) [German for: “At Home Outside”] is therefore developing a methodology and toolbox from a gender- and group-specific perspective, which serves not only the participatory evaluation of urban public spaces, but also the simulation-based development of different planning scenarios,which can, for example, be incorporated into space-time management concepts. Digital participation and simulation tools as well as tailor-made workshop designs are applied in the context of two Austrian use cases(Vienna, Zell am See) to identify spatio-temporal use patterns and group-specific requirements for the multifunctional use of space. In addition, the usability of the compiled tools (on the part of usersand process facilitators) is tested. The methodology to be developed also builds on knowledge from a well-tested target group segmentation approach with a special focus on active mobility (Markvica et al. 2020) to more accurately capturethe mobility and information needs of the (vulnerable) groups involved. This contribution gives a comprehensive insight into the project, its conceptual and methodological approach, and provides first results of use case specific surveys and tool-tests. From this, key findings are derived that address the potentialof the gender-sensitive use and developmentof(digital) participation and analysis tools to supportequal and environmentally friendly access to open spaces in residential environments

Smart Urban simulation tools for planning decision support need smart data and smart data gathering methods

Urban growth is a challenge for most cities all over the world, especially in less developed countries. This tendency calls for smart/innovative instruments to foster sustainable urban development. Decision support for urban planning is required in order to reduce costs and resources to better accommodate new population, willing to move into urban areas. Latin American countries e.g. went from being predominantly rural to predominantly urban within a few decades, leading to high concentrations of urban population. This urban growth is expected to continue leading to severe financial stress for city budgets by providing the required infrastructure. AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology has been contracted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to develop a smart “Urban Infrastructure Development Simulator” (UIDS) – a tool to performe urban growth simulation and related infrastructure cost estimations, which can be used effordless to support urban planning decissions. Therefore an Agent-based simulation model representing the urban growth by estimating dwelling behavior of the cities’ today’s residents and future residents from outside the urban region was developed. This urban growth simulation tool is based on input data with different spatial and temporal resolution. Data from Geographical Information Systems, Remote Sensing as well as statistical data are used to simulate scenarios for future development paths. To support the urban planning process such kind of tools need to have a high flexibility in data management, e.g., the import of new (e.g., more accurate) data to calculate new scenarios. But beyond this common need, what if the data is not or only partially available, how can a data gathering process be supported by new tools and methods. The paper will introduce different innovative ways urban planners can be supported to gain new data, which can be used in tools as the UIDS. The approaches developed enable the urban planners to easily introduce important tacit knowledge about the city into the simulation tool. Another method will depict how citizens participation for data collection can be enabled. The paper will further elaborate in general which challenges have been encountered and which solutions reduce the problems using different temporal and spatial data. The results discussed are based on experiences gathered whithin several urban growth simulation projects performed for different regions in Europe and Latin America

Characteristics of Urban Agglomerations in Different Continents: History, Patterns, Dynamics, Drivers and Trends

Urban agglomerations show different development patterns and stages. Here, we describe, discuss and compare urban agglomerations in different continents. The introduction section gives a general overview of specific issues of urban agglomerations. Different characteristics in Europe, Asia and America are discussed as experienced by the article’s co-authors, living in or working for urban agglomerations in these continents. First, the history of urbanization and agglomeration evolvement is described, then patterns, functional structures and relations, drivers as well as social and demographic characteristics are discussed (e.g. migration, aging, household structure, housing patterns, workplaces, etc.). Transportation infrastructure (roads, public transport systems) is also addressed as trigger for spatial dynamics causing certain effects (floor space, office and apartment rents releasing urban sprawl or hyper-densification), as well as gentrification. Further topics are urban governance and its impact on agglomeration development. Recent state and future trends will be debated, if important. A conclusion section summarizes the comparison of state, dynamics, drivers and trends

HotCity—A Gamified Token System for Reporting Waste Heat Sources

Urban planning needs to discover and incorporate new energy sources to meet climate protection targets in the future. Waste heat from industrial and urban infrastructure has proven to be a viable solution, but its proper identification can be challenging, especially for smaller and unconventional sources. Our project relies on the principles of gamification enhanced by a blockchain based token system and crowdsourcing as methods to collect and utilise spatial data such as the location and the size of previously unused heat sources. The mobile platform-neutral HotCity App en ables users to collectively patrol the city in search of waste heat sources and to gain tokens that can be exchanged for rewards. The blockchain platform Ardor was used for cheat proofing and to enable transparency for the reward system. The field test conducted in winter 2020/2021 showed high usability scores as well as high acceptance ratings of our approach opening up new use case scenarios in the context of spatial energy planning.©2022 Elsevier. This manuscript version is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY–NC–ND 4.0) license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Theoretical Framework for Integrated Neigbourhood Development to Ensure Ecological, Social and Climatic Performance

Urban development is traditionally a planning task in which many individual aspects, strategies and measures have to be considered and coordinated. Socio-economic, socio-demographic and socio-cultural change, fast growing cities, densification, supply of green infrastructure, resource management to name a few, are all urgent issues of our time that require an intensive examination of the challenges for urban development, as well as the development of coping strategies. Last but not least, the needs of climate protection, the consequences of climate change and the global loss of biodiversity are (emerging) pressing challenges for urban planning which have to be considered within all processes. At the same time, more and more data and tools are available, which - properly processed, used, examined and evaluated - support the cities in the design and implementation of their urban planning and urban development strategies. These tools are also increasingly used to automate and simplify these processes and analyses. Due to the complexity of challenges the common approach in urban planning is a sectoral approach (Ovink & Boeijenga 2018, Juschten et al. 2021) where individual experts analyse their field of action and based on these develop sectoral solutions and measures. There are numerous sectoral strategies in and for cities, some of which contain contradictory planning requirements with respect to other sectors and therefore depict the need of intersectoral and comprehensive planning strategies. The second approach necessary for integrated neighbourhood development is to consider the different planning and policy levels. Planning decisions at higher levels influence local decision-making possibilities and vice versa. The aim of this contribution is to present the development of a theoretical and methodical concept for integrated and participatory neighbourhood development processes. The article is based on a research project in the market town of Lustenau with around 25,000 inhabitants in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. The market town of Lustenau is taking a large-volume educational building project in the quarter Rotkreuz to address integrated, inter- and transdisciplinary development of an existing neighbourhood. The research question is: “How can integrated neighbourhood development be implemented taking into account climate protection, climate change adaptation, ecosystem services of urban nature, biodiversity and social concerns?”. This contribution describes how these fields can be characterised, analysed and incorporated in master planning processes and how digital tools support the analysis and balancing of these different requirements

KLIMUR: Methodik für ein klimaresilientes urbanes Ressourcenmanagement zur Umsetzung einer lokalen Ressourcenkreislaufwirtschaft

KLIMUR leistet einen Beitrag zur Entwicklung resilienter klimaneutraler Stadtteile mit hoher Ressourcenund Energieeffizienz, verstärkter Nutzung erneuerbarer Energieträger, sowie hoher Lebensqualität. Weiters wird zur Optimierung und Anpassung der städtischen Infrastruktur und des Dienstleistungsangebots beigetragen. Der hohe Ressourcenverbrauch des derzeitig vorherrschenden linearen Produktions- und Nutzungssystems stellt eine wesentliche Barriere für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung dar. Für das Fallbeispiel Zukunftshof (ZKH) werden die Möglichkeiten ausgelotet, wie aus einem alten Gutshof ein Vorzeigeprojekt für innovative urbane Landwirtschaft und klimaresiliente Stadtentwicklung werden kann. Der Zukunftshof soll der Startpunkt für ein nachhaltiges Energie- und Ressourcenkreislaufsystem im Wiener Stadtentwicklungsgebiet Rothneusiedl werden. KLIMUR entwickelt dazu die Methodik und Instrumente, um die Planungs- und Entscheidungsprozesse für die Realisierung lokaler Ressourcenkreislaufwirtschaft (Energie, Lebensmittel, Wasser) und integrierter Stadtteil-Energiekonzepte zu begleiten. Für das Fallbeispiel Zukunftshof werden neben den Energieflüssen (Wärme, Kälte und Strom) auch Ressourcenströme (Biomasse, Nährstoffe und Wasser) ermittelt, analysiert und simuliert. Die dabei verwendeten multikriteriellen Analysemodelle für die Simulation und Bewertung lassen Einschätzungen hinsichtlich ökologischer und energetischer Indikatoren zu und berücksichtigen wirtschaftliche Rahmenbedingungen der Realisierungsvarianten. Ebenso lassen sich aus der zeitlich und räumlich hoch aufgelösten Simulation auch Empfehlungen hinsichtlich organisatorischer Optimierungen (z.B.: abgestimmte Produktions- und Öffnungszeiten) als auch baulicher und infrastruktureller Anforderungen zur Unterstützung eines umfassenden lokalen Kreislaufwirtschaftssystems, ableiten. Dabei werden die teils in Konflikt stehenden Ziele dargestellt und in den Planungs- und Abstimmungsprozess mit den Stakeholderinnen und Stakeholdern diskutiert. Daraus werden mögliche Entwicklungsszenarien im Quartiersmaßstab für das Demonstrationsprojekt Zukunftshof sowie für den Stadtteil Rothneusiedl abgeleitet. Das Paper präsentiert die entwickelte Methodik und Instrumente, um die Planungs- und Entscheidungsprozesse für die Realisierung lokaler Ressourcenkreislaufwirtschaft (Energie, Lebensmittel, Wasser) und integrierter Stadtteil-Energiekonzepte zu begleiten (Stadt Wien, 2019)