Designing a decision-support tool for climate adaptive urban planning
Heat stress and air pollution ravages cities more and more. In a new Horizon Europe project, researchers will develop a digital twin that supports decision makers to design resilient urban areas that can cope with the changing climate. Researchers from TU Delft and 18 other partners receive the Horizon Europe grant for their project called UrbanAIR.
The digital twin can become a powerful tool for municipalities and urban planners to design districts that are safe, pleasant and healthy for residents. "We aim to deliver a prototype of the tool, so that we as a society can respond adequately to the changing climate," says Femke Vossepoel, professor of Earth System Simulation and scientific coordinator of UrbanAIR.
By simulating different scenarios, the digital twin will provide insight into, for instance, the wind that blows past a high apartment building, or how much heat stress will occur in determined city locations. “Sometimes slightly different building layouts, vegetation designs and tailored material decisions can make a significant difference for the city inhabitants comfort”, says Clara García-Sanchéz, assistant professor Architecture and Built Environment.
A diverse and complex model
The team is working on three areas of focus within the digital twin. "That makes the project not only challenging but also unique," Vossepoel says. "First, we bring models of the global atmosphere to the local level. Second, we model citizens' behaviour, and third, we evaluate both human and natural criteria in urban decision-making." The resulting digital twin can work out different scenarios relating to different criteria in terms of finance, environment or social equity. This is how the tool can become the right hand for policymakers.
Tailored to residents
An innovative part is the agent-based modelling for citizen’s behaviour. What do residents do when it's hot? Do they go to the park? Go to a cool office? TU Delft is already world-leading in developing simulation models of societies consisting of thousands of individual agents. “The ambition in UrbanAir is to bring it to a next level”, explain Amineh Ghorbani and Tatiana Filatova of the department of Multi Actor Systems. “We will link climate change scenarios with surveys of urban residents to explore when and how they change behaviour to adapt to heat stress.”
Meteorological models on street-level
To model climate, the researchers will start working from an existing global digital twin of the Earth's atmosphere (Destination Earth). "We will create a cascade of meteorological models down to urban and even street level," Vossepoel says. "With sensors in several cities, we measure temperature, wind and air pollution very locally. There is a considerable challenge here, because measuring in the city is difficult. We have relatively few measurements for such an area with high atmospheric variability. We will experiment how to make the most of the available data with data assimilation."