The deliverable D5.7: +Trondheim 2050 Bold City Vision and Guidelines (Vision for Sustainable Urban Transition) was submitted by TK with contributions from TK and NTNU in June 2022. The executive summary of the deliverable is available below and the full deliverable is at the end for download:
“The work in LHC Trondheim, in Trondheim Municipality and the municipality`s work with the UN Centre of Excellence on SDG City Transition, are overlapping, and for the purpose of the guidelines, it is recommended that it is seen as what the city has done through and together with initiatives sharing the same goal. The initiatives have reinforced one another and increased the positive synergies. That is why LHC Trondheim chose to share necessary information and preconditioning elements. Without showing the steps taken, the logic behind and how theory and practice coincides, this deliverable will fail at making complex matter understandable, adaptable and useful in further upscaling.
The Bold City Vision for LHC Trondheim is to become an energy positive city by 2050. In Norwegian the vision is called “Plussbyen Trondheim”. It is a vision, and not a document or a strategy. The prevailing deliverable and report answers to how we plan on reaching the vision, with description of methodology reasoning and paving the way to a guideline.
In order to create an energy positive city by 2050, there are many aspects that need to be taken into account. The LHC Trondheim vision is energy specific, however, strongly connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This elevates the work, gives it an unarguable timeliness, and energy is by all means a pervasive factor within the SDGs and their targets. Having that approach implies involving other sectors relevant for the multi-level, multi-disciplinary and multi-angle sustainable transformation. The guidelines to get there are applicable for other areas, and thereby more universal than if it was purely energy related.
The award winning innovation +CityxChange Bold City Vision Framework (Tanum et al., 2020) is the origin to all the derived frameworks and methodologies. The framework, including the methodology design, and the variety of uses is what culminates into guidelines. By linking it to the SDGs and a Norwegian context, it became a framework for Sustainable Societal Development. LHC Trondheim has used it to develop the municipal steering documents and perform SDG-budgeting. It is also valued as a SDG Transition Framework in the unpublished “Guidelines on the Sustainable Value Creation-led Voluntary Local Reviews in Norway and beyond” (Krause et al., 2021).
Trondheim Municipality received 3rd place as Icapital 2021, and that was much due to the systematics of the four pillars of Sustainable Value Creation (SVC). They demonstrate that taking stock of progress towards SDG is an opportunity to direct public and private partners towards mutually interesting and innovative opportunities for sustainable urban development. The four pillars of SVC; potential, readiness, opportunity, and impact are connected to the BCV framework by the second pillar, readiness. For all practical reasons it is the equivalent of the whole BCV framework. This is demonstrated within this deliverable, together with practical examples serving as guidance, and shown in the illustration below.
There are two guidelines presented in this deliverable; “Guidelines on sustainable value creation” and “Guidelines to create an energy positive city by 2050”. They are both a result of the four pillars of SVC, built around the logic that they represent, but the guideline for LHC Trondheims BCV has some additional prerequisites and future recommendations based on lessons learned. “Guidelines to create an energy positive city by 2050” is accompanied by a visualisation of the Trondheim BCV integrating activities, actions, and measures over the time span, and displaying relations between crucial steps and actions.
The guidelines will be useful for other cities and regions when exploring or expanding their scope and possibilities on archving the SDGs and becoming an energy positive city. However there are necessary levels of gouvernance that must be paid attention to. Especially striving for evidence based SDG-policy, political commitment, SDG-budgeting and multilateral partnerships for collaboration. Without this as an established basis, the city’s journey towards a greener, healthier, smarter and eventually climate neutrality may become cumbersome. The BCV framework has proven to be a valuable tool and methodology in the line of work in LHC Trondheim. Its continued enhancements have yielded results and knowledge vital to continue the progress of the city’s journey. The process is described in this deliverable, and contains many valuable aspects and methodologies in regards to implement the SDGs and create value on the journey towards becoming an energy positive city. “
