Twin Fjord

A participatory planning support system for sustainable land management

Contact

Dina Margrethe Aspen
Associate professor
Department of International Business
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Image: Screenshot Augment City

Objective

Twin Fjord is a cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary collaborative and knowledge building project supported by the Norwegian Research Council. The aim of the project is to develop a participatory planning support system for co-creative and sustainable land management using digital twin technology. The project provides an integrated decision support approach that enables planning practitioners, policy-makers, and other planning stakeholders to consider environmental, societal and economic impacts of land-use change from energy, transport and building infrastructure development.

Approach

Twin Fjord merges natural, computer, social, environmental, and political sciences to synthesize an approach to co-creative and sustainable land management. The participatory planning support system will be composed of three modules that will be integrated to support land-use planning decision making

  • a sustainability analytics knowledge base with relevant data, and impact assessment techniques
  • an interactive visualization interface based on 4-dimensional immersive mapping
  • a co-creation protocol for using the digital tool in planning design, analysis, and decision making.


Twin Fjord works with Fjord and Stranda municipalities as a case areas to develop and apply an integrated approach to sustainable land management. This will generate knowledge on how state of the art impact assessment, visualization and co-creation techniques can support dialogue and decision-making land-use planning processes in Norway making explicit sustainability considerations. The case area is useful as it contains a world heritage area, conservation areas and risk zones for rockslides and rockslide-triggered tsunami that pose particular challenges from a land-use planning and area development perspective. Due to high tourism loads, infrastructure for energy, transport and housing is necessary in the short term, and Twin Fjord will explore real life case studies in developing and applying the participatory planning support system.

The project is organized into three main work packages, described below. 

WP1

WP1 - Sustainability analysis

Work package 1 will provide the data and models to support planners and stakeholders in analysis, communication and decision-making. A key deliverable from the research are spatiotemporal sustainability models to analyse, simulate and assess green infrastructure and liveability.

WP2

WP2 - Visual interface

Work package 2 will develop visually intuitive map-based interfaces to support co-creative and sustainable land planning. Several territorial digital twins are developed to accommodate various functionalities useful for co-creative work processes.

WP3

WP3 - Process design

Work package 3 will work to develop co-creative processes where digital twin technologies are utilized to explore sustainable and liveable futures. The work package has designed a three-stage work process to engage stakeholders through initiation, design and implementation of local plans and strategies.

Partners

Project details

Duration: 2021 – 2024

Funding: Research Council of Norway (RCN)

More information: www.twinfjord.no/

Literature