Holistic approach to city planning with Urban Strategy powered by PTV Visum

  • A comprehensive solution for holistic and sustainable urban planning

    Over the last decade, developments all over the world have changed drastically. Around the world, small and large metropolitan areas are ramping up efforts to reinforce their attractiveness to their people and visitors. To achieve this, they strive for a balance between accessibility, safety and environmental quality, which in turn necessitates a holistic approach. By identifying people as the central element of any city, conventional city-making discipline together with architecture and engineering needs to recognize the influences of social issues, economic development, culture, recreational area as well as technology to provide an all-encompassing smart city dashboard.

    • The Problem

      The urban spatial planning methods currently used are sub-optimal and unable to calculate these requirements interactively as they work in silos and are very time-consuming. The different aspects are calculated individually which causes inaccuracies and inefficiencies. This leads to unguided urban expansion that perpetuates non-inclusive and unsustainable growth.

    • The Aim

      Thanks to its comprehensive interface and its powerful 3D visualization, Urban Strategy powered by PTV Visum allows decision making for different stakeholders from different city departments on all levels. They will instantly see the integrated impact of each scenario across all disciplines and simulate the benefits of any policy as it is updated in real-time as soon as anything changes.

    • The Solution

      The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) offers a powerful tool to combat the traditional method. Called Urban Strategy, this tool offers a complete package to balance the urban sustainable trinity that consists of Urban Planning, Environmental Quality and Transportation.

      Together with Urban Strategy, PTV Visum brings trusted multimodal modelling of the transport system with instantaneous calculation of the impacts on various environmental aspects. PTV Visum has, for over three decades, provided cities and governments around the world with a powerful tool to support strategic and operational decision making for the entire transport system.

      Although Urban Strategy and PTV Visum are both existing technologies, they are now combined to create a unique, innovative and powerful decision-making tool. For example, when selecting an area for urbanization, the platform will be able to simulate impacts such as increase in traffic, noise or air pollution and will point to the ideal scenario. From a holistic to a detailed view, Urban Strategy with PTV Visum enables policy makers to zoom in on a specific neighbourhood to calculate the impacts of measures planned and concurrently take into account the effects on all adjacent areas.

Main Key indicators

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    Traffic: Flow / Capacity; travel times; mode shares; demand distribution; routes
    Air Quality: NO2; PM10; PM2,5 [µg/m3]; exposure above limit values
    Noise (road, rail, industry): Noise levels [dB]; Noise exposure; noise annoyance [%HA]