Sustainable Urban Planning mechanisms for SIBIU

A solution by AETHON Engineering Consultants submitted to Innovative planning instruments for a new approach to residential development

Plan4Sibiu project aims at delivering a strategic public policy that in combination with a set of planning tools and capacity building actions, will introduce a new paradigm for sustainable spatial development.

(Pitched: 15/04/2018)

One Page Summary

Our proposed solution aims at delivering a strategic public policy that in combination with a set of planning tools and capacity building actions, will introduce a new paradigm for sustainable spatial development.
The public policy document will take the form of a report that will be created through a combination of EU policy goals concerning spatial planning and Romanian policy goals at the local and super-local (region/country) level. The report will be drafted through a standardized approach, initially analyzing the current status while, illustrating the socio-economic environment and the drivers for the development of the area. Following this, a short term and long-term vision will be also described, whilst it will demonstrate the benefits and impact of creating a residential area at the specified location utilizing sustainable development principles and sustainable cities concepts. Thus, the report will indicate a set of goals (Key Performance Indicators) at major topics of sustainable cities such as mobility, inclusive urbanization, preservation of natural heritage, green spaces, safety from natural catastrophes and more.
The goals of the report are considered level 2 indicators (where level 1 are the indicators from municipality/region/government). The report will develop a methodology and demonstrate a further break down of these goals to an additional level 3 which will be closer to implementation. In addition, the public policy document will also list best practices found in other cities in Europe concerning the application of sustainable development goals and the provision of new residential areas at all project targets: policy, planning and participatory actions.
Innovative planning instruments will be developed that will enable both policy makers and relevant stakeholders and citizens to explore, evaluate and capture the impact and benefits from the adoption and implementation of the indicators identified in the abovementioned policy. These tools will consist of:
● Dedicated econometric models that will be implemented, setting and computing spatio-temporal parameters that will allow the quantitative and qualitative determination of the impact of the public policy. Each model will be based on a variation of the Cobb–Douglas production function, aiming to capture the socio-economic and environmental benefits of the policy.
● User friendly visualization tools will be used for a spatially enabled representation of the goals of the policy. A comparison between the current status and the envisaged situation in the area of interest will concretize the wide adoption of the proposed strategy by the various stakeholders. These tools will be based on either open source or proprietary well known solutions (i.e. QGIS, ArcGIS, etc) suitable for spatial analysis, enabling the easy user interaction through a web-interface. In addition, SLEUTH, a cellular automata model will be calibrated and deployed, supporting visual inspections of the land cover - land use changes for the area of interest, while considering parameters under uncertainty.
An important element for the active involvement of citizens in planning process lies in their continuous interaction with urban planning experts and the relevant public bodies. Usually, an independent organization was used to bring experts and local community together, through the organization of dedicated events, where the representatives of the citizens formulated their views and ideas with respect to the goals of the public policy and its action plan. In the context of this application this view is reinforced by a series of measures and tools that will enable the strong public interaction as follows:
● A dedicated consultation forum will be established allowing the communication of ideas and opinions regarding the strategic public policy document. This tool is both online and physical. For the former, a Wordpress based electronic forum will be created that can be attached to the municipality’s website or work standalone. For the latter, we propose that a physical board is placed in the municipality building that contains printed out topics of the forum and where citizens can simply write their comments and ideas in paper and post them on the wall.
● Triggering of a "learning" process: the organization can organize a series of workshops to crystallize directions of the planning process and inform citizens and other stakeholders about the issues, problems, methodology and current level of analysis which will assist decision-making by increasing awareness and by providing a concrete capacity building scheme.
The goal of the process is clear: inform to succeed. The process aims to make feedback from citizens and other stakeholders clearer by explaining to them the methodology used and issues encountered in the planning process. By informing citizens/stakeholders which will lead to more informed ideas and suggestions that have greater impact and will be praised by planners.