Nature4Cities platform

The main objective of Nature4Cities project is to increase the awareness about the Nature Based Solution (NbS) and to promote new collaborative models for NbS uptake. Following this purpose, the Nature4Cities (N4C) Platform has been developed including a set of tools with the aim of spread information about the creation, assessment and implementation of NbS projects. The main objective of the N4C Platform is to help in the decision-making process when an intervention related to the application of Nature Based Solutions is planned at building, district or city scale.

Under this context, the N4C Platform offers an integration framework where several elements (existing and new tools/services developed within Nature4Cities project) are deployed and interconnected, all supported by additional horizontal functionalities in order to provide multiple functionalities.

The N4C Platform is divided into 3 groups of tools covering functionalities for the creation, assessment and implementation of NbS projects.

In the first group the tools are focused on the creation of an NbS project offering information to the users about NbS taxonomy, pioneer NbS projects already executed and other contextual information for creating an NbS project.

The second group is dedicated to the assessment of NbS projects, by the generation of an assessment framework (the NbS assessment module) able to create and assess different NbS scenarios from an urban, socio-economic and environmental point of view. This module has been developed from scratch and its potentiality is based on the integration of new assessment tools and existing tools improved and validated within the project.

The third group of modules is focused on the implementation of an NbS project, with special attention to citizen participation.

In total, 14 tools have been integrated and interconnected in the different groups of the N4C Platform using different integration actions: some of them developed from scratch and others integrated using APIs, iFrames or redirection to another URL. Complementary, new functionalities have been developed in the N4C Platform mainly to carry out the workflow of the NbS assessment module: project and scenarios creation, contextual information management, parametrization of the assessment tools, common visualization of the results and data exportation.

As a result, a challenging web-based Platform has been generated offering a common framework for the design, evaluation and implementation of NbS projects.

This platform was developed in the scope of the project Nature4Cities. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 730468