FLEXI kicks off !
Cities around the world need local ground-breaking steps to achieve their long-term goals for reducing energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Major urban redesign and redevelopment projects can potentially bring about radical reductions in energy use and emissions, but these are often hampered by uncertainties, risks, path dependencies, a multitude of stakeholders and, up until now, a slow pace of redevelopment. However, current urban representation, visualisation, modelling and collaboration capabilities in ICT and the wealth of urban data offer unprecedented possibilities for simplifying and structuring redesign and redevelopment processes in cities to achieve low carbon futures.
Highly complex and uncertain (re)development areas need help to facilitate partnerships being established between stakeholders with conflicting interests, visioning based on a common operational picture, identification of no-regret development options, given the uncertainties and risks.
The FLEXI pathfinder project that was launched on 16 January, explores the market potential for geo-ICT-supported and geodesign-based approaches, that provide stakeholders with a better overview and better support for prioritising decisions about future resources.
This integrated approach to urban transition addresses the main barriers to systemic change and aligns different stakeholders (for instance municipality, real estate, land and infrastructure owners and developers, knowledge institutes and innovators), resulting in an acceleration of redevelopment (cost savings), more targeted investments by redevelopment partners, and a lower energy use and GHG emission for areas and traffic.
The event took place at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim. Partners in FLEXI are:
- Faculty of Architecture and Design of NTNU,
- Asplan Viak
- Trondheim Kommune
- Kjeldsberg Eiendomsforvaltning
- Sør-Trøndelag Fylkeskommune
- Statens Vegvesen
- Miljøpakken.
The project is funded by Climate-KIC, Sluppen Forum and in-kind contributions from all consortium partners.