Impact of Spatial Transitions on Subsurface

Organisation || Gemeente Enschede
Project Type || M.Sc. Thesis
Candidate || Frank Risseeuw

Dutch cities face transition challenges that require significant infrastructure construction works. These works have a large impact on existing public spaces, both above and below ground. They include upgrading the electricity grid, deploying alternative heating solutions, creating urban water retention areas, and adding charging networks for electric vehicles.

Currently, these infrastructure works are commissioned and managed by different policy arenas. Their decision-makers operate within distinctive public and private organisations (like municipalities and grid operators) and lack a holistic overview of all changes that are planned in public space. Consequently, infrastructure owners are unable to understand interface, and prioritise the work that needs to be executed first. Currently, space is assigned based on a first-come-fist-serve basis, but it is desired that informed trade-offs are made based on analysis of conflicting spatial claims.

The goal of this study therefore was to develop a system that models the spatial impact of interrelated sectoral challenges and supports different decision-makers in understanding and jointly prioritising distinct scenarios. To demonstrate the value of this tool, three sectoral challenges have been selected for this study: electrification, heat transition, and climate adaptation.

2D Interface showing a proposed location for a electricity distribution station (blue), heat distribution station (orange), climate adaptation measures (green) and calculated spatial claims of underground utilities in m3/m2 (yellow/orange raster)

After validating the usefulness of the tool with decision-makers from the municipality, we found that:

1. Spatial tools enable the analysis of the complexity and interrelations between combined infrastructure transition. They reveal the (im)possibilities of different development scenarios, and stress the merit of using spatial conditionality as a decision-making factor.

2. Spatial tools are providing a partial understanding of the decision problem and solution space, but other socioeconomic factors may not be included yet in such tools. Therefore, it is pivotal to design an integrated planning process that embeds such tools in order to facilitate the decision-making process.

3. Spatial tools need to balance between domain expertise and abstraction. In other words, they need to be sufficiently complex to allow experts to interact with it and trust its outcomes, while it should also be generic enough to bridge boundaries between these disciplines. Future pilots should thus validate whether the balance between expertise and abstraction is adequate to support collaborative decision-making.