Abstract
The starting point of the EE Settlement project in 2017 was the need for spatial planning tools and guidelines that could be used for planning of new settlements. Two Austrian tools, ZERsiedelt and ELAS, have served as a foundation for the EE Settlement tool development.
Knowledge needs
During the first two years of the project period, the challenges and needs of relevant actors were evaluated through a workshop and interviews (WP1). The objective was to identify the knowledge gap and gather inputs from relevant actors as a basis for the development of the background model (WP2), web-based tool (WP3), guideline and recommendations (WP5), and future dissemination of the project results among user groups (WP6).
From the workshop and interviews, it was determined that municipalities need a simplified “earlyphase” option/version of the tool. This option would limit the scope of optimization in the early planning phase of an area development, as a basis for discussion and to enable building a solid foundation for later stages. Several actors emphasized the need for a user friendly and transparent tool, developed using existing acknowledged methodologies (e.g. NS 3720 GHG emission calculation for buildings) and national databases (e.g. data from municipalities, Statistics Norway), that can enable quantification or visualization of the environmental and economic consequences of choosing different area development lternatives
in the early planning stage.
The main findings from the workshop and interviews show that there is a need for a decision support tool that can give a more comprehensive picture of the consequences of the development of an area in the early planning stage (Venås and Mellegård 2018). In addition, the findings show the need for a guideline incorporating qualitative aspects, such as social factors, which will not be explicitly addressed within the tool. Two stateof-the-art reviews of existing studies, databases, and tools, one focused on travel behaviour and housing preferences (Landa-Mata et al 2018), and one on district-level tools and databases (Fufa et al 2019), were performed to fill in the gaps in the current approach and bring new insights to the project.
The findings from literature review, workshop and interviews, were used as a background for other WPs to develop the background model, prototype tool and guideline and recommendations. A working document was developed defining the goal and scope of the project based on these findings (Klinski 2018).