GreenTwins

Connecting built environment, vegetation and people by using urban digital twins.

The aim of the GreenTwins project was twofold:

• to create and visualize through user-friendly interfaces the layer of dynamic digital vegetation for the Urban Digital Twins of Helsinki and Tallinn;
• to create user-friendly physical and virtual spaces for digitally aided public participation and collaboration.

Thus, GreenTwins aimed to bring forward the importance of urban vegetation for the well-being of citizens, to forecast and visualize the temporal and seasonal changes in urban vegetation, as well as to involve citizens into designing urban green areas.

The outcomes of the GreenTwins project are:

Digital tools: Virtual Green Planner (VGP) and Urban Tempo (UT)
VGP is a Unity game-engine based 3D application for co-designing built and green areas. It is primarily meant as a tool for active citizens to create alternative urban visions and discuss them. UT is a COVISE based 3D augmented reality application for realistic visualisations of built and green areas. It is meant as a tool for professionals and active citizens to view the temporal and seasonal changes in the urban vegetation.

Layer of vegetation for Urban Digital Twin (UDT)

The digital plant library extends the UDT by creating a layer of dynamic digital urban vegetation. The dynamic aspect is a major novelty of the GreenTwins project. The layer of vegetation includes 3D models of plants and the information about their growth patterns and seasonal changes in the local climatic conditions. Thus, the layer of vegetation allows professionals and active citizens to view how the visual appearance and the ecosystem services of the urban green areas will likely change over time and depending of the season. The layer of vegetation is used in the digital tools VGP and UT.

Physical space: AvaLinn (Open City, est.)

Smart City Planning Hub in the city center of Tallinn at Kaarli pst 1 is a physical space equipped with state-of-the-art visualization technology for facilitating digitally aided participation and collaboration in urban planning. This physical space makes it possible to bring together various stakeholders—without concern for their level of digital literacy—into planning discussions and decision-making. Digital tools, in turn, are seen merely as means for building common understanding of future change in the built environment.

See the service created based on this pilot project “Herbarium.ai“.

Duration of the pilot project: January 2020 – May 2023
Total budget: 1.3M €, including 979 172 € from TalTech budget

The pilot project was 100% financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.