Design Implications of Model-Generated Urban Data

Published by the Architectural Research Centers Consortium under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.The staggering complexity of urban environment and long timescales in the causal mechanisms prevent designers to fully understand the implications of their design interventions. In order to investigate these causal mechanisms and provide measurable trends, a model that partially replicates urban complexity has been developed. Using a cellular automata approach to model land use types and markets for products, services, labour and property, the model has enabled numerical experiments to be carried out. The results revealed causal mechanisms and performance metrics obtained in a much shorter timescale than the real-life processes, pointing to a number of design implications for urban environments.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

CAST – City analysis simulation tool: an integrated model of land use, population, transport and economics

The paper reports on research into city modelling based on principles of Science of Complexity. It focuses on integration of major processes in cities, such as economics, land use, transport and population movement. This is achieved using an extended Cellular Automata model, which allows cells to form networks, and operate on individual financial budgets. There are 22 cell types with individual processes in them. The formation of networks is based on supply and demand mechanisms for products, skills, accommodation, and services. Demand for transport is obtained as an emergent property of the system resulting from the network connectivity and relevant economic mechanisms. Population movement is a consequence of mechanisms in the housing and skill markets. Income and expenditure of cells are self-regulated through market mechanisms and changing patterns of land use are a consequence of collective interaction of all mechanisms in the model, which are integrated through emergence

Biophilic urban developments following dynamic flows of tree-shaped architectures

Latest theories and practices in Biophilic designs of the urban space regard the urban fabric as being composed of several interrelated layers of energetic structure influencing each other in a non-linear manner primarily. The interaction between two or more interfaces of the urban space layers evolves into new and non-predictable properties. Evolution and creation of new boundaries/interfaces follows laws related to fractal growth; most of the times this particular evolution is defined by laws of physics, such as Thermodynamics and Constructal Law. Designs that do not follow these laws may produce anti-natural and hostile environments, which do not fit into human beings’ evolution, and thus, fail to enhance life by all means. The author of this paper should like to illustrate how new developments of urbanism worldwide currently work upon conceptual and town planning models based not only upon cutting-edge technology, but also upon natural laws and patterns of life and human behaviours strictly related to flaws and movement dictated by natural phenomena. When abrupt interruption of the urban structure has occurred, a consequent design solution does not even guarantee flowing and freedom to morph. It is impossible to create harmonic designs which naturally “unite the animate with the inanimate”, as Adrian Bejan and Sylvie Lorente affirm, whenever urban sprawl fails to encompass Biophilic solutions related to tree-shaped architectures. The author argues that Constructal invasion into the urban space “as fundamental problems of access to flow: volume to point, area to point, line to point, and the respective reverse flow directions” can only guarantee high standard quality of life in either contemporary or future cities developments

Accelerating Cooperative Planning for Automated Vehicles with Learned Heuristics and Monte Carlo Tree Search

Efficient driving in urban traffic scenarios requires foresight. The observation of other traffic participants and the inference of their possible next actions depending on the own action is considered cooperative prediction and planning. Humans are well equipped with the capability to predict the actions of multiple interacting traffic participants and plan accordingly, without the need to directly communicate with others. Prior work has shown that it is possible to achieve effective cooperative planning without the need for explicit communication. However, the search space for cooperative plans is so large that most of the computational budget is spent on exploring the search space in unpromising regions that are far away from the solution. To accelerate the planning process, we combined learned heuristics with a cooperative planning method to guide the search towards regions with promising actions, yielding better solutions at lower computational costs

A new paradigm for deep sustainability: biourbanism

Biourbanism introduces new conceptual and planning models for a new kind of city, valuing social and economical regeneration of the built environment through developing and healthy communities. Thus, it combines technical aspects, such as zero-emission, energy efficiency, information technology, etc. and the promotion of social sustainability and human well being. In effect, this new paradigm endorses principles of geometrical coherence, Biophilic design, BioArchitecture, Biomimesis, etc. in practices of design and also new urban policies and, especially Biopolitics to promote urban revitalization by ensuring that man-made changes do not have harmful effects to humans. Green city standards start inside the designs of each building and continue either in unbuilt spaces surrounding buildings or inside complex infrastructural networks, connecting buildings and people. The proposed presentation should illustrate how new exciting developments recently, such as fractals, complexity theory, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence are interrelated and constantly stimulate interaction between human beings and the surrounding environment. New Biophilic solutions in designs of buildings have been proved as attractive opportunities for new markets of housing. Thus, some new infrastructural projects start embracing Biophilic advanced solutions which finally aim at energy efficiency and optimal performance. As parallel activity we can now see emerging new innovative monitoring systems of building health not only in small scale, but also in large scale buildings, such as rail stations, for example, and commercial centres or even sometimes entire educational complexes integrated to new infrastructural projects. Some important case studies are going to be presented; they have been analysed and evaluated by Biourbanism and Biophilia principles and applied methods of design

Harmonious architecture and kinetic linear energy

This is a chapter in a book based upon the work from an Erasmus International Project which took place in Athens in July 2012