B.Green - Baltic Green Urban Infrastructure Planning

To addresses the climate change related challenges that cities increasingly face, B.Green aims at improving urban planning by developing a new green infrastructure  (GI) planning concept into the pre-planning process of cities. The aim is to increase the amount of city districts and new areas in which the B.Green approach is used as an official planning’s pre-phase tool. B.Green addresses also two urban planning challenges: how to combine green and grey infrastructure in the context of urban mobility development and how to ensure that multifunctional GI is taken into account throughout the pre-planning phase. The project utilises recent research and combines it with local knowledge produced by residents and other local stakeholders during the project. 

The project will focus on the twin cities of Helsinki and Tallinn, in which the co-created B.Green concept and GI solutions will be demonstrated. In the local pilots, both agile approaches as well as active citizen participation with the aid of digital tools, which are all important elements of the B.Green concept, are implemented. The implementation is done with wide stakeholder engagement, utilization of applied digital tools and encouraging capacity building in the BSR area. In building and testing the B.Green concept also advanced technologies such as simulation, VR, AR, geotracking and wifi-sniffers, are utilised, also creating new business potential. These solutions improve the mutual learning and communication process between different stakeholders. 

The project will have long term effects on both local level through pilots that are linked to large scale infrastructural development, as well as wide scale-up potential through the associated partner networks. B.Green is also tightly connected to local and larger strategies, such as the cities carbon neutral objectives and the EUBSR strategy.