Climate change largely impacts urban life. Extreme temperatures have an impact on sea level rise and, subsequently, nefarious events such as floods, droughts and storms, have costly impacts on cities’ basic services, infrastructure, housing, livelihoods and health. Cities are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions, and so its stakeholders must come forward with out of the box solutions to promote innovation and stimulate urban resilience by limiting negative impacts of climate change. But for a problem to be addressed, it must first be seen and felt. Visualization is a potential way of increasing engagement with climate change, and IT developments, such as Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, provide significant advancements that can be transformative in engaging audiences with climate change issues. This is at the basis of Augmentcity which developed a ground-breaking way to operate digital twins of cities, enabling data and “what-if” scenarios to be analysed and visualised in an interactive and immersive visualisation tool to be used by policy-makers, researchers, companies and citizens. Our proposal builds on Augmentcity and apply it in terms of demonstration, co-creation and mobilization of stakeholders for capacity-building and collective decision-making in 3 European urban areas for resilient urban infrastructure adaptation to climate change.

Result summary (tentative)

CREST is a 3-year project started the 1st April 2022, run by a consortium of 9 partners from France, Poland and Norway, with the goal of exploring a new methodology to empower vulnerable coastal urban areas to face the challenge of climate change adaptation through a groundbreaking initiative leveraging Augmented Reality (AR) technology and co-creation approaches. By setting-up and rolling-out collaborative platforms though Digital Twinning and co-creation activities engaging local citizens and communities, based on citizens science and participatory methodologies, CREST wants to support and empower environmental decision-making and innovative policy practices, enabling robust and resilient responses to climate change.

Climate change largely impacts urban life. Extreme temperatures have an impact on sea level rise and, subsequently, nefarious events such as floods, droughts and storms have costly impacts on cities’ basic services, infrastructure, housing, livelihoods and health. Cities are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions, and so its stakeholders must come forward with out of the box solutions to promote innovation and stimulate urban resilience by limiting negative impacts of climate change. But for a problem to be addressed, it must first be seen and felt. Visualization is a potential way of increasing engagement with climate change, and IT developments, such as Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, provide significant advancements that can be transformative in engaging audiences with climate change issues. This is at the basis of Augmentcity which developed an innovative way to operate Digital Twins of cities, enabling data and “what-if” scenarios to be analysed and visualized in an interactive and immersive visualisation tool to be used by policy-makers, researchers, companies and citizens. Our project builds on AugmentCity and apply it in terms of demonstration, co-creation and mobilization of stakeholders for capacity-building and collective decision-making in 3 European urban areas for resilient urban infrastructure adaptation to climate change.

Methodology

The CREST is an innovation action, including both applied and fundamental/basic R&I activities, and proposing a new collaborative model between the local and regional stakeholders – administrations, business, academia and the wide civil society – to co-create adaptation solutions. Bringing all stakeholders together in this co-evolutionary process to accelerate this societal transformation is a cornerstone of this project. The target groups of CREST project are researchers, companies, citizens, civil society and public authorities.

From the very beginning of the project, one of the basic assumptions was to engage citizens in the research process through the use of modern technological solutions – creating digital twins of cities and regions. The main goal of using digital twins was to provide lay citizens with the ability to easily imagine the threats resulting from climate change to the places they live. Good visualization of problems allows for their better understanding and, consequently, greater acceptance for introducing changes, including infrastructural solutions that increase local resilience to climate change.

The project covered the following cities and regions:
1. More og Romsdal is a Norwegian municipality with its main towns – Kristiansund and Ålesund
2. Bordeaux Métropole – the metropolis of the city of Bordeaux in France
3. Kołobrzeg Commune – Poland

CREST is structured in 5 Work Packages:

WP1 – Sustainability and resilience monitoring framework of urban areas (led by ETTIS/INRAe and BSE) identified and selected relevant KPIs and collected respective data for performing sustainability and resilience monitoring and climate impact assessment in the targeted urban areas, as well as for feeding the Digital Twin visualizations/simulations in WP3.

WP2 – Policy co-creation processes based on participatory/citizen science approach (led by Institute of Urban and Regional Development) mapped state-of-the-art to create a deeper understanding of the local status quo and engaging local communities to determine the climate resilience challenges to be the use cases for the co-creation and digital twinning experiments in the 3 urban areas (pilot sites). Following a common methodology, these experiments have been organised in all pilot sites in the framework of focus-groups and co-creation workshops (using a control group approach), as well as subsequent follow-up activities.

WP3 – Digital Twins (led by AugmentCity) developed, installed, run and upscaled DTs for the 3 urban areas.

WP4 – Communication, dissemination and sustainability (led by ACCENT SUD) was responsible for maximising CREST´s visibility and the sustainability and replicability of its results locally and at a larger geographical scale (European and global), engaging, therefore, broader publics.

WP5 – Project Management (led by the project coordinator)

Results

Develop and implement a monitoring and impact assessment framework for sustainability and climate resilience
– General sustainability and climate resilience key performance indicators have been identified
– Data for the indicators are collected in the 3 urban areas are published in the Lollipop page of CREST website, linked to the INRAe institute: https://crest.pages.mia.inra.fr/dashboard/

This dashboard uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the U4SSC framework (United for Smart Sustainable Cities), an initiative led by the United Nations to help cities assess their performance in terms of sustainability and smart development. The U4SSC aims to provide decision-makers and stakeholders with clear and visual insights toward sustainability goals. The base KPIs and targets are first computed using various data sources provided by partners. We then calculate the “% of target” for each KPI. The formula will be different depending on the target type : “The higher the better”, “the lower the better” and taking into account some specificities (some KPIs are already calculated as ratios or percentages). KPIs are converted to categories (and colors) using the U4SSC methodology:

Promote capacity building and co-creation for greater resilience of urban infrastructure

The project developed a common research protocol for all regions, including the following main steps in the participatory and co-creative processes involving lay citizens:
• Survey aimed at assessing and understanding the awareness of ordinary citizens about the resilience of cities and regions to climate change. The survey with the same set of questions was conducted in all three regions.
• The survey results were used as a basis for conducting focus meetings with groups of various city stakeholders, including professionals such as firefighters, local entrepreneurs, people dealing with water supply, crisis management, etc., and representatives of local authorities. The primary goal of these meetings was to identify the most important threats and specific locations that could serve as case studies (use case) to work with solutions.
• For the use cases identified during the focus groups, data was collected, and their digital equivalents were developed, along with scenarios for the development of threats resulting from climate change that were identified during the focus meetings.
• The final step was to conduct co-creation workshops where groups of lay citizens and professionals worked together to find specific solutions using new and existing infrastructure to increase the resilience of selected locations to the threats associated with climate change.

What we were able to observe during the project is that using digital twins engage people more, during the workshops. It was possible to notice a greater interest in digital twins compared to the involvement of groups using traditional, paper maps. Participants approached the screen, pointing to individual elements, asking to zoom in and display scenarios – repeating already displayed ones. Working with AR/DTs triggered more interactions with the tool and prompted participants to discuss and looking for better, more detailed solutions.

Create Graphical Digital Twins (DTs), an innovative engagement and decision support for urban transformation

• Alpha and final versions of The Digital Twins (DTs) have been developed: 3 DTs in 4D (3D plus time lapses), 1 per project urban area, with the different case studies of climate threats
• The videos are available on CREST website
• Climate threats visualized in the DTs for the 3 urban areas have been selected through citizen involvement (survey) and stakeholder engagement activities (focus groups).
• Interactive on-site workshops have been organized in the three urban areas and in international events (like at Smart City Expo Barcelona)

References

Website: https://crestproject.eu
All the publications are and will be available at www.crestproject.eu/resources/

We organize a webinar to present all the outputs and results of CREST:
27th February 11am-12:30pm
Register here on this link or on https://crestproject.eu/events/

Contact: scott@augmentcity.no
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