Abstract:

To appropriately address a geo-political ecosystem where new policies come into force for various applications like tackling climate change and striving for a circular economy, municipalities and industries need to act swiftly and often reevaluate former methods generally agreed upon. Recently, the use of agile methodologies and design thinking is getting recognized in municipalities (Starostka, et al., 2022). Most levels of community planning and management could, in theory, benefit and learn from a real time data-driven agile way of working, including city planning, construction, traffic-planning and maintenance of infrastructure. However, there is a lack of standard work-flows in terms of proven methodologies and their actual beneficial impact. In this small-scale pilot study, business developers from a municipality and a real estate company are collaborating with a local university to articulate and demonstrate an agile data-driven methodology based on participatory design. As an example, changes in the infrastructure are immediately reflected in a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) through which citizens and professionals can access sensor data and location. We aim to show how a rather radical shift in workflow can facilitate sustainable change in infrastructure design and maintenance, by relying heavily on a relatively small municipality’s self-designed, low cost, and data-driven agile process. In theory such a process could enable municipalities to learn and more quickly take well-grounded measures to reach their climate goals while demanding less of already quite limited resources (money and time). As this small-scale project is a low-risk exploratory testbed aimed to inform more scaled up deployment in larger municipalities and regions, we also identify hinderances for such wider use. Early findings reveal challenges with regards to communication between stakeholders not familiar with design thinking, privacy, and cybersecurity when using off-the-shelf low-cost sensors.

Keywords:

Municipalities, climate goals, agile methodologies, design thinking, city planning, collaboration, sensor data, learning.