Integration and visualisation of urban sprawl and urban heating indicators from complex data in a context of nature-based solutions

• Autor(a) principal: Bodilis, Carole Simone Juliette
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/24917
• topic: Urban planning; Planning support system; Nature-Based Solutions; Urban sprawl; Urban heating

Cities are facing an increasing number of challenges as a result of rapid global urbanization, challenges that become even more critical in the face of population growth and climate change. Two major ones include urban sprawl and urban heating, namely the un-controlled low density, leapfrog and scattered development at the urban fringe and the higher temperatures in urban areas than in the rural surroundings. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), solutions inspired or supported by nature, offer an innovative way to deal with these challenges and mitigate their harmful consequences. Indeed, NBS provide aesthetic services and attract residents while, at the same time, providing regulating and recreational services. Nevertheless, there is a need to show the effectiveness of NBS through evidence-based approaches and relevant indicators. The objective of this study is to provide policy-relevant visualisations of urban sprawl and urban heating indicators to provide information, communication and analysis support for decision-making around NBS establishment, taking the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands as a case study. To this end, relevant indicators are selected from the literature and according to data available from the two disciplinary models used to assess urban sprawl (SULD) and urban heating (WRF-SUEWS) and, in turn, a user interface (UI) is developed to visualise these indicators in a user-friendly and understandable way. The UI is developed following a designimplementation- evaluation cycle, as it was tested and evaluated three times by pilot end-users as well as actual stakeholders in Eindhoven. Results show that complex model results rendered in a simple way at different scales (plot, neighbourhood and city) provide relevant information on the multiple impacts of NBS for stakeholders as well as the first step towards the apprehension of the interrelated impacts of NBS in cities. These results serve, in addition, as inputs for the development of the Systemic Decision Support Tool (SDST) of the UNaLab project (funded under the European Union Horizon 2020)