The annual Tygron Community of Practice took place this year on November 11th. This meeting is by and for users: a moment where knowledge, experience, skills, applications, and the latest technological developments come together. During the CoP, various Tygron users shared how they apply the Platform, among them were the engineers from Aveco de Bondt.
Spatial Planning
The session on using Tygron by Aveco de Bondt clearly demonstrated how policy and public space design are drawing closer and closer together, through interaction, visualization, and above all, collaboration. Hoi-Man Hau, Consultant Urban Water, and Guy van Hemel and Emiel Oosterhuis, both Urban Water Advisors at Aveco de Bondt, presented two practical cases in which Tygron acted as a catalyst for conversations that normally run a lot less smoothly.
Hoi-Man Hau shared how he initially felt skeptical about using Tygron in his field. In the beginning, he saw Tygron primarily as 'fancy software': "Nice pictures, beautiful visualizations, but what can it actually do?" It wasn't until he involved the platform much earlier in the process that it clicked. While policy can easily get stuck in abstractions, the tool sparked dialogue among stakeholders because every intervention can be calculated and visualized immediately.
From policy to practice
The first case was a great example of this. In an existing residential area with no planned sewer renewal, they still wanted to take climate-adaptive measures. By simulating a 90 mm rainstorm, it became immediately visible where water accumulates and how it moves. Emiel Oosterhuis explained why Tygron was used for this case. "It is a visualization tool par excellence. We want to sit down with policy makers and show them where the problems are and open up ways to solve them."
This allowed design choices, such as more greenery, permeable parking spaces, and raised thresholds, to be calculated live. The resulting map images proved more convincing than any textual explanation. In addition, unexpected insights surfaced, such as routes that proved unsafe for emergency services during extreme precipitation. Because policymakers, designers, managers, and consultants walked through the model together, a shared understanding of the substantive frameworks and technical limitations emerged. "At the end of the process, you could really tell they had gained more understanding for one another. And also the drive not to look at limitations, but rather at opportunities," Oosterhuis said.
From practice to policy
The second case took place in a subsiding and water-sensitive neighborhood in the west of the country. Here, the tensions between disciplines surfaced sharply. While water advisors were excited about interactive simulations, the road manager looked primarily at risks and maintenance certainty. Guy van Hemel gave an example of how far apart the parties sometimes were: "The road manager at the table basically preferred to pave everything over. That just goes to show how conservative he was, while others wanted to do something innovative with the space." By not avoiding that friction but instead making it visible, a joint direction was eventually established.
What emerged strongly is that Tygron is not necessarily *the* solution, but it does accelerate the conversation that leads to better solutions. The tool helps concretize ambitions, makes choices transparent, and exposes where policy and practice clash. A prerequisite was that everyone was clear on the level of abstraction at which the model operates, to avoid disappointments or misinterpretations.
The session by Aveco de Bondt showed that digital simulation is not just a technical tool, but also a way to work more integratedly and smarter. And perhaps more importantly, to get policymakers and practitioners talking to each other instead of past each other.
See also how Aveco de Bondt, together with the De Stichtse Rijnlanden Water Board (HDSR) and the municipality of Utrecht, calculates and visualizes the future developments of the Groenewoud project area, both on the functioning of the water system during extreme precipitation and on the expected heat stress.
