360cityscan: integrated solutions to face urban challenges

Tractebel has developed the 360° city scan, a holistic methodology to assess cities and guide them according to their needs and priorities. Scans have already been deployed in more than 40 cities worldwide. Based on this scan, we offer integrated approaches to our clients, tailormade solutions leveraging on our urban engineering expertise. The perspectives of the 360cityscan meet the global challenges cities face today: climate change, resource scarcity, technologisation, demographic changes, social transformation and glocalisation. Within cities, the intensity of these challenges is much higher than in rural conditions. All perspectives are somehow related to these challenges; the perspectives give therefore an accurate status of the city against these threats. The perspectives work together as a whole towards a balanced city. The perspectives must be seen as different layers of a city, a balanced city encloses all the different perspectives in a good ratio. When one perspective is underdeveloped, the city does not work properly or excludes citizens. Preferably, each intervention in the city has a positive impact on all the perspectives. We created a tool to measure the level of maturity for the different themes. The inner 2 circles represent the status of the physical system of the theme, the outer 2 circles the ‘efficiency’ or ‘quality’. To illustrate this for ‘water’: the inner circles indicate the status of the basic infrastructure of water (amount of people with wastewater collection), in the outer circles we measure the level of wastewater treatment by the city. The city is shown in a user-friendly 360° diagram with an individual score for each theme, arranged by perspective. The diagram summarizes in a visual way the maturity of a city and highlights the strength’s and challenges. If well designed and managed, cities offer important opportunities for economic development and for expanding access to basic services, including health care and education, for large numbers of people. Coming from a engineering background of top-level expertise in Energy, Transport, Water, Urban design, ...the integration of different teams and know-how is essential to deal with the complexity of issues and challenges that cities are facing worldwide and for successful sustainable urban development . Searching for synergy between different disciplines is in this sense key to unlock hidden potentials. When they meet and connect, creative solutions to complex problems are found. Urban processes are also becoming increasingly complex given the fast-changing evolutions in terms of stakeholders, policy governance and political processes. In this perspective a more process oriented and collaborative way of working is needed, with different in between goals of diverse scale and nature instead of blue print masterplanning approach. This way of working will allow a stronger local embedded and bottom-up approach involving a large set of stakeholders from the beginning to the end. Also Technology is changing the way citizens live, move and work: smart city platforms, BIM, City Information Modelling, ... .Cities are becoming data platforms: as more data are available, urban development projects should be able to collect and exploit them to build new sustainable and liveable cities. For this reason technologies need to be combined with a strong focus on qualitative design in the entire range of elements that compose a city: from infrastructures to public space and buildings. The Integrated Approaches (11) represent innovative transversal domains defined to emphasize the integration of our services and expertise related to cities and territories: Places of mobility - Water Urbanism - Productive landscapes - Recycling territories - Smart networks ... . All together the Integrated Approaches cover the complexity of issues that cities are facing nowadays through the fundamental paradigm of ‘integration’.