Prof. Dr. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey | Landscape Planning and Urban Systems

CoCoNet – Co-creative Cohabitation Network

Urban open space urgently needs transformation to meet the global urban challenges coming along with climate change and environmental degradation. Merging two integrated co-creative processes of modeling and design, CoCoNet aims to provide a method to reveal synergies between sustainable mobility, climate adaptation and biodiversity, and to guide co-design of sustainable and inclusive transformation of urban streetscapes.

Motivation and Goal

Cities are confronted with the conflicting targets of both providing sufficient living space and infrastructure while at the same time providing green and open space to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss and to offer livable urban districts. For sustainable urban redevelopment, an integrated planning approach to urban streetscapes is needed, combining travel modeling with the planning for other purposes, such as climate adaptation, noise reduction or biodiversity preservation. Thereby, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) that vegetation and unsealed soils can provide are the prerequisite for biodiversity, rainwater management, and amenities of urban open spaces. Although sophisticated analytical and design tools can inform the transformation from various perspectives, such resources are not widely embraced across stakeholders for co-creation of desired solutions.

In this context, the Driving Urban Transitions to a Sustainable Future (DUT) project «CoCoNet – Co-creative Cohabitation Network» aims at developing an integrated model-supported design approach to facilitate collaboration of different stakeholders for co-creating urban development solutions. The focus is laid on restructuring urban streetscapes at the district level and concentrates on combining mobility measures with NbS. The project will highlight spatial potentials using integrated spatial modeling of mobility, soundscape, climate and ecological connectivity. An audiovisual simulation of the streetscapes and the related NbS and new mobility measures will be developed to bring heterogeneous stakeholders into collaboration and to support them in revealing synergies and creating optimal measures for restructuring the space. The project intends to demonstrate an applicable co-creative process as well as develop guidelines for policy and decision makers to create new inner-urban spatial potentials by restructuring the space.

This transdisciplinary project is carried out in collaboration with scientists from the TU Wien and the TU Munich, as well as with transport planners of the yverkehrsplanung GmbH. Moreover, it will involve stakeholders such as policy and decision makers, and local initiatives into a co-creative process to collaboratively reimagine the future urban space.

Approach

We will focus on developing, implementing, and iteratively enhancing an audiovisual simulation approach to vividly communicate impacts of changes of urban open spaces due to modal shift and NbS on the soundscape. It involves simplifying a complex acoustic model for use in a science-design-loop, traffic modeling including sound (e.g., with SUMO – Simulation of Urban Mobility), and audiovisual simulation in the Unity game engine using 3D point clouds and advancing an existing Unity-app zur Soundscape-Gestaltung und Bewertung. The work will focus on applying the modelling and audiovisual approach to districts in Zurich and Vienna and investigate the contribution of NbS (e.g., trees, plant patches, parks, water elements) to the perceived enhancement of the urban soundscape. Furthermore, using an optimization modeling, synergies between modal shift and NbS regarding various objectives shall be identified to develop rules for solution design based on the optimization results.

Significance of the Project

CoCoNet will provide a planning methodology directly applicable in the creation of vibrant, sustainable urban neighborhoods giving valuable support to policy and decision makers. Further, it will make socio-ecological aspects and the coexistence of humans and other organisms a central point in the urban planning process.