4D in city transformations : systems, processes and actors

Sammanfattning: The city of Kiruna is facing the challenge of relocating a large proportion of the existing city centre as a consequence of the subsidence caused by underground mining activities. This relocation includes urban residential areas, industrial areas, offices and spaces such as parks and infrastructure. There are a number of challenges in such a city transformation process which require the active participation of the public in the urban planning processes. A big challenge is the stakeholder management since there are stakeholders who share responsibility for the decision-making for the urban plans of the city transformation. The sharing of decision-making has led to a situation where plans are only accepted through discussions and consensus. Much of the planning content is related to time and space which means that 4D models, being 3D planning models linked with schedules, are suitable for enhancing the understanding of the time dimension of planning content, as well as their status. Therefore it is hypothesised that: “4D visualization enhances the opportunity to create transparent, accessible and understandable plans for stakeholders to support communication with urban planners.” The idea of such a support system is that the stakeholders can monitor how the planning content and the planning stages including the realization evolves over time. To investigate how such a planning support system can be realized, the following research questions were defined: RQ1. What are the most important aspects to be communicated in a city transformation process?RQ2.How can this information be visualized and communicated to stakeholders to support a transparent decision-making process?RQ3. What are the requirements of a support system to manage such a process?The city transformation in Kiruna was used as a case study involving the first three steps of a 5 step system research approach.The most important aspects of the city transformation were understanding the forces of transformation, the complexity of the problem to solve (its wickedness), stakeholder values, planning stages and alternatives and the planning regulations controlling the decision-making process. Two main challenges was identified: first, the stakeholders’ power and interests change over time. Second, current methods of communicating the planning proposals do not encourage the public to participate in the city transformation process. The urban information can be visualized to support the accessibility of plans by the public, enhancing the opportunity to share ideas and remarks and support collaborative design and decision-making. Adding a time dimension can help the understanding of (1) the transition from an original state to a new planned state and (2) the spatial consequences of an urban transformation process over time and the dynamics of urban planning under re-development.The case study showed that the traditional communication of urban plans through open exhibition and documents did not provide an efficient method of dissemination and receiving information, especially between the public and urban planners. Therefore, as an answer to the third research question, a planning support system was proposed that could support iterations, visualize plans and status, visualize the planning content adapted to different stakeholders and support two-way asynchronous communication all in a simple, easy-to-use interface to encourage the public to participate in the urban planning process. A first prototype of the communication platform was created based on Google Earth and Facebook, including time-space visualization of urban planning information and the support of two-way asynchronous communication for collecting geo-referenced public opinions. A generic model of urban planning processes was also developed to describe the relationship between stakeholder, design and process more deeply. It was concluded that a PSS must support process, design and stakeholders in order to be efficient. The model was tested against the regulatory framework of the Swedish Plan and Building Act. The development of a generic PSS collaboration hub was proposed that supports the different levels of urban planning processes in a city.