Cities and regions are facing two challenges at the same time: digitalisation and sustainable transformation. Regulatory and administrative practices are a central starting point for both.
What do the digitalisation of administration and sustainability have to do with spatial planning? Spatial planning creates the legal framework for the spatial development of the country, for example for settlement, open space and infrastructure planning. Specific objectives and principles are defined for certain areas and various forms of land use are harmonised. The sustainable and climate-adapted reorganisation of infrastructures is not possible without spatial planning. Societal adaptation to climate change makes it essential to rethink spatial and urban planning. New challenges include the adaptation of cities and municipalities to heat events, flooding and the sustainable reorganisation of the heat supply.
Demand forecasts and environmental risks have also previously been used as the basis for public planning and regulation. However, climate change scenarios not only lead to major uncertainties regarding future weather extremes, but the demand forecasts should also not perpetuate an unsustainable status quo that should actually be overcome. Therefore, on the one hand, it is important to calculate with the help of city models and climate simulations; on the other hand, a deeper understanding of the assumptions and practices on which previous planning instruments are based, which can have an impact on the effectiveness of climate adaptation, is also necessary.
In many cases, sustainability criteria are also taken into account in municipal decision-making alongside the usual financial criteria. In some municipalities, for example, the highest bid is not always accepted when selling or allocating land, but rather the bid that pursues the desired social objectives. Digitalisation can now be used to simplify and accelerate such evaluation practices. While social and environmental objectives are not new to decision-making and administrative processes in cities, there has been little scrutiny of how effective a regulation or administrative decision was and what social and environmental impact it had, as the relevant data and computing capacities were previously not available to a sufficient extent. This has also prevented awareness of the possibilities of evidence-based policy from developing. Initiatives such as the non-profit Coleridge Initiative in the USA are now strengthening this awareness through greater networking and data integration between public bodies and promoting data literacy in administrations.
How cities develop depends heavily on the goals, principles, scope of action and practices of planning. Digitised, structured and linked administrative documents are needed to be able to analyse and understand these better. By simplifying the identification of document types and information and automating the reading of unstructured text data, fragmented and non-machine-readable spatial planning documents can be made accessible more quickly. On the other hand, networking and data integration as well as new possibilities for generating and processing large amounts of data enable comparisons and evaluations of spatial planning approaches. A positive side effect is that this also makes administrative decisions more accessible and comprehensible for citizens. Social and environmental objectives become transparent and the achievement of objectives can be better evaluated. Digital sustainability offers great potential for adapting to climate change. The handling of climate risks and sustainability impacts can be improved through digitalised administrative documents, harmonised technical standards, AI-based land use forecasts and inter-municipal data platforms for planning information. This could break down silos between sectors and administrative areas and thus accelerate coordination processes for sustainable transformation. Digital twins create 3D images of cities and regions that enable the simulation of different future scenarios in one area. In combination with the digital twins, it is possible to understand which regulations could lead to the desired results and thus predict their effectiveness in the face of certain climate risks and sustainability impacts. As an effect, climate modelling can also take into account how different regulatory scenarios influence land use and thus the effects of climate change.
Comparability with analogue phenomena
This reutilisation of administrative data can be imagined as 3D sculptures consisting of seemingly randomly arranged objects that create the image of a figure from a certain observer position. This is known as anarmorphosis. For example, the spatially specific ecological footprint of a city can be found in the administrative data. The ecological footprint is an indicator that makes resource consumption measurable and thus provides a basis for sustainability goals and strategies. However, existing registers need to be re-linked and restructured for such a sustainability assessment in order to make them visible. In order to be able to compare energy consumption per person in different neighbourhoods, for example, the energy consumption data of municipal utilities must first be placed on a spatial grid.
Social relevance
Administrative actions such as the granting of building permits are activities that leave a data trail in huge data and document architectures. Their conception and development is sometimes a historic feat for states and cities. They were sometimes designed centuries ago for a specific purpose and are therefore geared towards certain functions that can only change slowly. However, these infrastructures are long-lasting and consistently register administrative processes, decisions and the objects and actors involved. Registers are therefore the perception of organisations. If you want to analyse administrative data for new insights, you have to partially reprocess, structure, format and arrange it.
Up to this point, technical, administrative and legal issues associated with digitalisation and new evaluation options need to be clarified. Lighthouse projects such as New Hanse have focussed on how data governance can be designed in such a way that data generated and collected in the city can be used for the benefit of urban society. In an ideas competition, exclusive mobility data was made available to gain new, useful insights into cycling and micromobility. Digitalisation offers great potential for sustainable transformation, but at the same time digitalisation itself should be implemented in a socially and ecologically sustainable way, for example by ensuring that data is used sparingly. The use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and complicated simulations must be justified due to the high energy consumption. The endeavour to shape these two social upheavals in an integrated manner is referred to as a double transformation. The links between sustainability and digitalisation are therefore manifold: the sustainability of digitalisation processes stands alongside the (partially) automated registration, measurement and evaluation of processes with sustainability data and the effective enforcement of sustainability practices through data.
