Spatial Simulation LabMany municipalities are suffering from great development pressure – dealing with challenges based on social andtechnical needs and with limited financial capacities. In addition, they have to comply with overarching sustainabilitygoals (e.g. SDGs, spatial planning concepts). In order to make viable decisions for sustainable communitydevelopment, goals and frameworks need to be defined together, and expert knowledge is essential. Certificates forbuilding and neighborhood based on assessments promise planning and decision support. These certificationsystems, as well as available pre-assessments, are able to assess concrete projects based on elaborated plans and designs.
In practice decision makers often deal with different planning alternatives, not yet specified in detail. Theassessments based on certifications are linked to external audits during the assessment process, not focusing onthe involvement of decision makers or project developers. These external audits are time and cost intensiveprocesses and are therefore usually only used for larger projects.
There is a gap assessing project ideas and rough concepts within early planning phases. Moreover there are nopossibilities for self assessments of planning alternatives that do not require external reviews and focus oncooperative planning processes, i.e. ideas and innovations based on project developers, communityrepresentatives, local experts and citizens.
This project therefore aims to develop the concept study for a planning and decision support tool for evaluating”spatial sustainability” – the AD Evaluator. This enables planning stakeholders in all planning phases to evaluateplanning alternatives, taking into account impacts and interactions, and at the same time identifies necessarymeasures to achieve objectives in the form of checklists.
The AD Evaluator enables sustainable spatial transformation from the idea to realization with a focus on strategicco-design and co-assessment. Project developers and decision-makers (municipality, state, federal government) canuse the low-threshold approach of the AD Evaluator to carry out independent assessments to compare alternatives.The AD Evaluator thus offers time- and cost-efficient planning support even for very early planning phases, wherenew ideas and innovations for sustainable spatial transformation can be introduced and robust frameworkconditions and objectives can be strategically developed.
The AD Evaluator is implemented in Python, which enables a modular structure and easy transfer to otherprogramming environments for later extensions and developments. The objectives and the planning project aremapped on the basis of questionnaires. The questionnaires are linked to System Dynamics models, which canweigh up impacts and interactions and enable an evaluation. The concept study visualizes spatial impacts andcreates customised sustainability checklists. This makes it easier to implement global and regional sustainabilitygoals in practice.
