New Atkins Digital Tool Will Enable Collaborative Sustainable Urban Development Planning
A new digital tool to help stakeholders collaborate on sustainable urban growth is being developed by an Atkins team in Stockholm, Sweden. The project is funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency as a part of a four-year €7 million government program to support innovations in city planning.
By using the Planning Information Modelling (PIM) tool, urban planners will have a single platform to easily engage with stakeholders such as politicians, government departments, consultants and the public. The shared multidisciplinary platform will enable considered and sustainable solutions for planning and upgrades in public transport, recreational areas, public buildings, water and waste technology and noise pollution, and will significantly speed up and clarify the planning process.
Elias Prokofiev, urban planning and environment consultant at Atkins, said: “Imagine the collaboration of urban planners with engineers, civil and technical experts, real estate developers and politicians within the same platform. Design changes can be immediately reflected on plans and end the need for the exporting, importing, re-calculating and re-sharing of documents. It will create a greater understanding for dependencies between the parameters.”
Currently in development, the long-term goal for the integrated PIM platform is to connect various technical, economic and social urban planning disciplines to the 3D base tool. Any developer will be able to create extensions to the tool within their field of expertise, increasing the number of parameters for users to consider. This allows for more complex operations and high-detail analysis, resulting in viable proposals for the built environment of the future.
In total, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency has funded 16 projects out of 109 grant applications. Atkins’ proposal was assessed as one of the projects with the highest level of innovation, the highest possibility to be implemented and with significant gains towards sustainable urban development. The prototype platform is due for completion in the summer of 2018.
