Virtual Gothenburg Lab

For Gothenburg’s 400-year anniversary in 2021, a digital twin of the city was in the works, ”Virtual Gothenburg”. Virtual Gothenburg Lab was a two-year project designed for exploring and developing the usability of Virtual Gothenburg.

The project comprised five urban development pilot projects that address the needs of the City of Gothenburg. The aim of these were to understand the needs of the city and how visualised data and the Virtual Gothenburg can add value to city planning and development and support insight and informed decisions. RISE lead the pilot “Social sustainability in urban development”, where digital twins as tools for sustainable and equal city environments were explored. The other pilot projects, where RISE was also involved, looked at the Central Station area, the interaction between self driving vehicles and other road users in so called “shared spaces”, the impact of massive rains, so-called “cloud-bursts”, and how to develop and preserve the city silhouette. 

The project created a unique opportunity to test and develop work approaches, tools and methods for visual, digital and virtual work. The project was made possible thanks to funding from Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, and is referred to as a test bed, a shared development environment for innovation testing. 

From RISE, participants included Kristina Knaving, Peter Ljungstrand, Thomas Wingate, Gabriella di Feola, László Sall Vesselényi and Jacob Michelsen. A student thesis was also written at RISE by Malmö University interaction design student Sanna Klefbom on design aspects of urban digital twins as tools for social sustainability: https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-45934