Creative Visualizations for our future Smart Built Environment

The climate impact from the built environment is large.

In order to create a sustainable, climate-resilient built environment and a quality-assured future society, a system perspective needs to be included into industrial infrastructure processes. Not just the processes themselves, but also the way that infrastructure is to be used should be included.

The development of a sustainable transport system is largely influenced by choices made in planning processes but also in newbuild projects (and sometimes during renovation).

Above all, it is parking (one of our strongest policy tools to influence car traffic) and available areas for unloading and loading goods and waste that are affected, which in turn affects attractiveness and the possibility of using different modes of transport.

There are now also many potential major changes happening in the transport system, including Maas (Mobility as a service), sharing services (electric scooters, bicycles, etc.) and self-driving cars.

This development makes it increasingly important to keep up-to-date on and understand what needs will exist and thereby contribute to the sustainable built environment.At the same time, built environment development projects suffer from a lack of engagement from citizens.

It is one of the great challenges of our time to engage and involve citizens in the societal transformation needed to manage the climate crisis, without creating protest movements.

It is largely about understanding the needs of citizens and producing positive narratives of the future sustainable Sweden that is needed.

The aim of the project is to develop an innovative service for the interpretation of traffic and transport data in industrialbuilt environment processes in order to create more citizen engagement for sustainable development.

A completely new way of visualizing data - both with figures and images can increase the opportunity for citizens to be involved in the shift towards a more sustainable society.

Although we often use numbers in discussions about the our future sustainable transport system (e.g. half of journeys will be made by bicycle, or freight traffic will decrease by 10%), it is difficult to interpret what this might mean for one´s everyday life.

Through collaboration between digitization and urban planning experts together with visual artists, we will develop new services.

The services are primarily aimed at actors who work with early-stage built environment projects - i.e. the public sector (municipalities), but also developers and construction companies.