“The most important criteria for a climate-friendly city are the location of homes and the daily commute destinations like workplaces, schools, kindergartens and shops. You shouldn’t need a car,” says Lillian Sve Rokseth at SINTEF.
Rokseth has analysed plan proposals in three Norwegian urban development projects and come up with a set of indicators to assess how climate-friendly different urban plans are. The indicators can be used both in planning completely new areas and developing existing neighbourhoods.
Researchers at NTNU collaborated in carrying out the work for the Research Centre on Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities’ FME ZEN project.
Street network is a critical factor
The researchers looked at three pilot areas: Sluppen in Trondheim municipality, “New city – new airport” in Bodø municipality and Fornebu in Bærum municipality.
Fornebu is the furthest along in the planning process, with the analysis for the KDP-3 district plan already completed. “We were honestly surprised by how well the process went,” says Rokseth. The plan laid the groundwork for a good mix of housing and office areas, short distances to public transport, good accessibility to other daily destinations and a high proportion of accessible public green spaces.
“The street network within the area worked very well, and we only found small things that could be improved. For example, connecting to the surrounding areas could be made even better for cycling and walking. This would increase the likelihood that more people would choose not to drive.”
At Sluppen in Trondheim, no homes have been built yet, so the researchers analysed three different plan proposals. The walking distance to the city centre is different for all the plan proposals, but all are shorter than current options. “That’s interesting and a bit unexpected, because the project area is so small compared with the distance to the city centre,” says the researcher.
“The explanation lies in the fine-grained street networks. It’s not surprising in and of itself that a finer-grained street network results in shorter walking distances, but our analyses document this really clearly. We hope that the analyses will provide new guidelines for future planning,” says Rokseth.
Until now, analysing street networks in connection with climate emissions has not been routine practice. The density of offices and homes has been higher on the agenda.
“Municipality planners will be able to use the new tool to visualize how much the street network actually impacts transportation choices – and thus climate emissions as well,” says the researcher.
Municipalities want more analyses
In Bodø, the researchers compared three proposals for the planned 3.4 km2 New city – new airport urban expansion where Bodø’s old airport was located. The expansion will take several decades to complete and will accommodate 30 000 residents and 20 000 jobs when the entire area is fully developed.
Three architectural teams each submitted their own proposal for the district plan that Bodø adopted in 2022. The analyses show that the plan proposals connect the area to the existing street network to greatly varying degrees. The density of street intersections in the proposals also varied considerably, from 46 to 173 intersections per square kilometre.
The analyses provided the municipality with input, including:
- The development area itself can be delimited to create a more compact urban environment.
- Mobility hubs for parking on the outskirts of the area – for example at stations and places that many people pass by – will make it easier to choose eco-friendly transport within the area.
- Access to public open spaces was good in all plan proposals. Nevertheless, more parks in the northern part of the planning area, and high population density in the surrounding areas, would make the parks more accessible to more people.
Kristoffer Larsen Seivåg, Bodø’s spatial planner, found the analyses useful for testing the planning approaches in the proposals from the architectural teams.
“Although we have an overarching plan map, we used the lessons learned from the analyses to design an environmental programme, a mobility plan and other planning regulations,” says Seivåg.
The municipality also took the lessons learned into account when they continued to develop area plans.
“The FME ZEN principles have been used as the basis for a feasibility study that we prepared in the spring, which in turn will form the basis for the area regulations.”
All three municipalities in the project have given feedback that the analyses were useful. Indeed, they found them so useful that researchers were hired afterwards to analyse several plan proposals, since the municipalities do not have the time or capacity to carry out the analyses themselves.
“It’s important to point out that the analyses are not a climate accounting, but a set of criteria that provide an opportunity to compare different alternatives. It’s difficult to specify standard values, because urban development projects are so varied and have such different assumptions,” says Rokseth.
References:
Urban form in a ZEN perspective. A summary of work with GIS-based methods for analysis and visualization
Bodø municipality’s project page
