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Augmented Urbans

Visionary, Participatory Planning and Integrated Management for Resilient Cities
Visionary, Participatory Planning and Integrated Management for Resilient Cities

Exploring the nexus of sustainable urban development, participatory planning and XR technologies – insights from five cities around the Baltic Sea. Co-funded by EU’s Central Baltic Interreg Programme. Project started 1st March 2018 and will end 28th February 2021.

Process Main Stages: 

1) Definitions of sustainability and resilience, challenges and possible solutions in the case cities.

2) Parallel implementation scenarios of plans.

3) Critical evaluation of plans from a resilience and sustainability perspective, possibly with modification of plans.

4) Expertise exchange both on local and interregional level, contribution to implementation from new stakeholders.

5) Working methods for utilising VR/AR/MR technologies in the integrated urban management and recommendations in which cases and state of the planning process they’d be best utilised.

6) VR/AR/MR visualisations of the case areas, and the possibility to modify them. This is new in the world of novel technologies, and to planning processes.

7) VR/AR/MR scenarios of the cities in the future, aimed to guide planning and decision-making.

8) Communications of insights gained, interactive exhibitions, video reports, articles, scientific articles.

Touchpoints & Bottlenecks: 

With help of new extended reality (XR) technologies, the project improves stakeholder participation, and linkage between the long-term visions and short-term actions in the cities for enhancing urban resilience.

Benchmarking and reference to other similar initiatives: 

Live Baltic Campus project - http://livebalticcampus.eu/

Success Factors / Barriers: 
  • The involvment of all local/regional actors - users, developers, researchers and cities
Conclusion: 

The project will result in five integrated urban plans produced in Helsinki, Tallinn, Gävle, Cesis and Viimsi in collaboration with local stakeholders. New, augmented, virtual and mixed reality technologies (AR, VR & MR) are explored and utilized as tools to support urban planning processes in guiding discussions, and providing immersive scenarios.

Dos: 
  • Involve all key stakeholders from the beginning
  • Participatory approach
  • Engagement of all relevant actors
  • Support from new technologies (in this project XR technologies)
Dont's: 
  • Silo thinking
  • Traditional innovation process where actors have seperate roles in different phases