Sammendrag
This report summarizes ZEN research on urban design and accessibility. With greenhouse gas emissions as the issue and urban neighbourhoods as the scale, the goal has been to develop analytical methods and evaluation tools for use by municipalities and other actors in planning at city and neighbourhood scale. This has provided two criteria for setting priorities in this work. One is to identify characteristics of urban form that directly or indirectly affect greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to studies of urban form more generally or in other contexts. The second is that the aspects of urban form being studied should be within what is determined through planning, and which can also be analysed and evaluated on the basis of the information available in the relevant phases of project development and planning. On this background, the work has consisted of three main parts: (1) identification of GIS-based methods for modelling and analysing urban form characteristics influencing greenhouse gas emissions, (2) testing and applying these methods in analyses and evaluations of urban development proposals with the ZEN pilots as cases, and (3) formulation of guidelines for planning both as input to specific urban development projects and as evaluation tools in the form of ZEN KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). The ZEN KPIs are an important part of ZEN in that they bring together the breadth of ZEN research in a tool for use in planning and project evaluation. The process of developing the evaluation tools has taken place in collaboration with the ZEN pilot projects Sluppen (Trondheim), Bodø new city - new airport (Bodø) and Fornebu (Bærum). Based on input from the municipal planning departments related to factors like access to data, access to GIS expertise, clear compilation of results and the extent to which the municipalities are able to identify and determine the urban form characteristics included through planning maps or plan descriptions in municipal sub-plans or zoning plans, we have defined a set of indicators for evaluating urban form on neighbourhood and city scale. The indicators are applicable both in planning of entire new urban developments and in assessment and development of existing neighbourhoods. With this, we hope to contribute to tools that will be useful both in planning and for assessing urban development proposals. To succeed with sustainable and attractive urban development, it is crucial that individual topics such as those we have specified in the indicators not only are assessed separately, but that synergies between different topics are emphasised. In both short- and long-term perspectives, it is important to think flexibility and mixed use when it comes to overall land use, allocation of street spaces, and also when deciding types and layouts of blocks and buildings.