OSLO – March 2025 – In a significant convergence of urban design, computational engineering, and climate policy, researchers and students at Blackbridge Institute Polytechnic and Arts have developed a sophisticated new predictive model designed to forecast the real-world impact of climate change on Oslo’s urban infrastructure. The project, named ‘Project Farsight’, has culminated in the creation of a high-resolution ‘digital twin’ of the city’s waterfront, including the Institute’s own neighbourhood of Filipstad Brygge, offering an unprecedentedly detailed view of future climate vulnerabilities.
For the past eighteen months, a dedicated, cross-disciplinary team has been working to address a critical flaw in conventional climate modelling. While existing models are effective at predicting broad, regional climate shifts, they often lack the granularity to be truly useful for city planners, architects, and policymakers who must make decisions at the level of individual streets and buildings. Project Farsight was conceived to bridge this gap.
The core of the project is a powerful machine learning algorithm, developed by postgraduate students from the Computational Engineering & Intelligent Systems discipline under the guidance of Dr. Albinas Novak. The algorithm integrates vast and disparate datasets: historical weather patterns from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, high-resolution topographical LiDAR scans of the city, architectural blueprints of major buildings, and even anonymised fluid dynamics data reflecting harbour traffic. It is this fusion of data that allows the model to move beyond simple flood mapping.
“What we are trying to do is simulate a complex, living system,” explains Dr. Lena Petrova, Head of Architectural & Urban Design, who co-led the project. “It’s not enough to know that sea levels will rise by a certain number of centimetres. We need to understand the cascading effects. How will that increased soil salinity affect the root systems of our waterfront parks? How will more frequent, intense rainfall overwhelm specific drainage junctions built fifty years ago? Where will wind-tunnelling effects, amplified by new high-rise buildings, pose a risk during future storms? Our model begins to provide tangible, though not always comfortable, answers to these questions.”
The project’s initial phase focused on creating the digital twin of the Filipstad Brygge and Aker Brygge areas. Undergraduate architecture students meticulously mapped the built environment, while Sixth Form A-Level students in Computer Science assisted with the painstaking process of data cleansing and verification – a crucial, if not always glamorous, part of real-world research.
One of the most innovative aspects of the model is its ability to simulate the impact of proposed mitigation strategies. Users can introduce new variables into the digital environment, such as a proposed seawall, a new public park designed as a bioswale to absorb water, or even changes in building material regulations to favour more resilient surfaces. The model then runs thousands of simulations to forecast the effectiveness of these interventions over a fifty-year timeline.
“It was genuinely startling to see the results,” commented Maria Lind, a Master’s student in Global Political Economy & Governance who used the model for her thesis on the economics of climate adaptation. “When we modelled the impact of a minor policy change regarding permeable paving surfaces across the district, the model predicted a far more significant reduction in localised flooding than anyone had anticipated. It provides policymakers with powerful evidence to justify investment in solutions that might otherwise be overlooked.”
The project has not been without its challenges. The computational demands of running such a detailed model are immense, and the team faced significant hurdles in harmonising data from different sources and formats. The results, too, are a stark reminder of the scale of the climate challenge. The initial simulations have highlighted several previously underestimated vulnerabilities in the city’s coastal infrastructure. Yet, the team remains steadfast in its purpose.
Project Farsight is now moving into its second phase. The goal is to expand the digital twin to encompass the entire Oslo metropolitan area and to make a simplified, interactive version of the model accessible to municipal authorities and urban planning consultants. It is a testament to the Institute’s belief that the most pressing challenges of our time cannot be solved in isolation. They require a dynamic, and sometimes demanding, collaboration between disciplines, a shared language between technologists, designers, and policymakers, and a collective willingness to look at the future with clarity and resolve.
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