​​​Twin Fjord is a cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary collaborative and knowledge building project that aims to develop a participatory planning support system for co-creative and sustainable land management using digital twin technology. The project will provide 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.

 

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

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Case area

Twin Fjord will use the areas in Fjord and Stranda municipality as a case area 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.

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Work packages

Twin Fjord has three work packages (WPs) that focuses on participatory planning support system models, interfaces and processes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work package 1, "Sustainability analytics", will provide the data and models to support planners and planning stakeholders in analysis, communication and decision-making. The work package is led by NTNU in Ålesund.

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Work package 2, "Visual interface", will develop a visually intuitive digital twin interface to co-creative and sustainable land planning. The work package is led by AugmentCity.

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Work package 3, "Co-creative process design", will work to develop co-creative processes where digital twin technologies are utilized to explore sustainable and liveable futures. The WP is led by Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).

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Project workflow

The project will use municipal case studies to develop and test new processes and tools. The objective is to develop an integrated participatory planning support system for co-creative and sustainable land planning. The project workflow follows four steps to achieve this goal.

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Problem structuring encompass activities to understanding the challenges relevant to both the processes in and results of planning. The project has engaged project stakeholders to express these challenges in a series of workshops. For more information, read about these sessions on our blog.

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Case generation is necessary to define specific contexts where the planning support system can be developed and tested. Case studies are defined for both Fjord and Stranda municipality to facilitate stakeholder engagement, real-time value from engaging in project activities and long-term insights gained from participatory project sessions.

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Process and tool design include all necessary research and development activities to construct a participatory planning support system. This concerns the tool itself (WP 1 and WP 2) and the co-creative process design (WP 3).

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Case exploration is where the designed tools are used through a series of test session workshops along with project and case stakeholders to test, validate and improve the integrated participatory planning support system. Twin Fjord will explore the proposed design in workshop sessions in 2023 and 2024.

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