Building a knowledge management model through TOSCA as a digital tool for urban development

This paper analyses the different adaptations of TOSCA, an open-source geographical information system (GIS) toolkit to different urban contexts across the world and the learnings through these adaptations; involving the synthesis of extracted knowledge, its translation and final adaptation into a location-customised tool for decision-support in the context of planning. Knowledge management and extraction methodologies developed and adapted in the process of implementation of this toolkit in India, Ecuador and Palestine provide insights into the application of digital tools for urban planning and
contribute to the streamline of knowledge extraction mechanisms across different cultural contexts. TOSCA, or Toolkit for Open and Sustainable City Planning and Analysis, has been developed since 2019, between the HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU) as research partner and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) GmbH as funding partner, to develop strategies and tools for sustainable urban development in two initial pilot locations _India and Ecuador_ and from 2022 in Palestine; for each case involving additional local cooperation partners. The tool was conceptualised as an open-source, easy-to-use and scalable tool for accessing complex urban analyses, as a solution to the fact that GIS tends to be an expensive, complex and inaccessible software for many rapidly urbanising contexts with low resources. The three contexts of India, Ecuador and Palestine presented vastly different urban challenges and actors, which required the customization of a tool development process to carry out the implementation of the project in each location. Necessary steps involved the identification of pressing issues, the definition of a relevant use case, the identification of roles and mobilisation of the local stakeholders, tool adaptation, technical revisions and knowledge transfer for its sustainable take-up. After understanding the outcomes of the three past implementation projects, a model of ideal cooperation for knowledge management emerges as a potential way to systematise the methods for gathering knowledge and rendering it applicable to different scenarios. The identification of four fundamental agents in this model emerge, according to their roles and produced effect in the development process for TOSCA: (the funding agent) dissemination of means for sustainable development, (the R&D agent) incorporation of digital technologies in urban systems, (the local institution agent) consolidating local capacity building and (the local authority agent) public outreach and uptake activities. TOSCA, as a tool intended to contribute to sustainable growth in urban regions, lies at the intersection of these four roles, which are codependent on each other in different ways. The objective of this paper is a first approximation to the exploration of this model as a potential solution for knowledge management and dissemination of a toolkit such as TOSCA.