Urban Planning Advisory Team (UPAT)
‘New Airport – Next City – Smart Bodø’, City of Bodø, Norway, 28 May – 03 June 2017
Introduction
The city of Bodø is the administration centre in the County of Nordland and is the largest city in the county with 50 000 citizens. Bodø is experiencing a rapid growth in the population and is now transforming into a larger modern Norwegian city. In February 2014, the city council adopted the overall strategic plan – Bodø 2030. The vision for Bodø 2030 is “an attractive capital in the North”. This strategy contains six different focus areas where one focus area is “sustainable city development”.
Within in the focus area sustainable city development, the city of Bodø has stated their climatic goal: Bodø is an innovative low emission city, where the citizens feel safe for nature related dangers. With this statement, Bodø will play an active role in both reduction of climate gas emission and in adaption to a future climate. Both innovation and development of new technology will be at central element in this work.
The national government has decided to end the military air activity in Bodø within the next seven to ten years. The runway is from the early 1950’s and has a maximum of ten years left before it has to be replaced by a new runway. This means that it has to be built a new runway in Bodø within 2025. This gives opportunities to think future city development in a completely new perspective.
Bodø has developed two different scenarios for city development with the two possible solutions for future airport in Bodø. The first alternative is a new parallel runway 80 meter from today’s runway. The other option is building a new airport one kilometre to the east of today’s airport. By building a new airport in the area that is today occupied by the military activity gives Bodø around 360 hectares for city development. An area big enough to house 25 000 citizens and gives the city large new business areas.
By moving the airport and building a complete new city in near relation with the historic city centre, Bodø also get the opportunity to build a smart city for the future. In this work the vision of building the smartest city in the world was born. How does a city look like in 2065? What kind of technology is used in a future city? How is future buildings formed? What kind of energy sources are used in future cities?
