Visualization methods for sustainable planning

In urban planning, both measuring and communicating sustainability are among the most recent concerns. Therefore, the primary emphasis of this thesis concerns establishing metrics and visualization techniques in order to deal with indicators of sustainability. First, this thesis provides a novel approach for measuring and monitoring two indicators of sustainability - urban sprawl and carbon footprints – at the urban neighborhood scale. By designating different sectors of relevant carbon emissions as well as different household categories, this thesis provides detailed information about carbon emissions in order to estimate impacts of daily consumption decisions and travel behavior by household type. Regarding urban sprawl, a novel gridcell-based indicator model is established, based on different dimensions of urban sprawl. Second, this thesis presents a three-step-based visualization method, addressing predefined requirements for geovisualizations and visualizing those indicator results, introduced above. This surface-visualization combines advantages from both common GIS representation and three-dimensional representation techniques within the field of urban planning, and is assisted by a web-based graphical user interface which allows for accessing the results by the public. In addition, by focusing on local neighborhoods, this thesis provides an alternative approach in measuring and visualizing both indicators by utilizing a Neighborhood Relation Diagram (NRD), based on weighted Voronoi diagrams. Thus, the user is able to a) utilize original census data, b) compare direct impacts of indicator results on the neighboring cells, and c) compare both indicators of sustainability visually

Compact Cities Are Complex, Intense and Diverse but: Can We Design Such Emergent Urban Properties?

Compact cities are promoted by global and local policies in response to environmental, economic and social challenges. It is argued that increased density and diversity of urban functions and demographics are expected to deliver positive outcomes. ‘Emerged’ urban area which have developed incrementally seem to exhibit such dense and diverse characteristics, acquired through adaptation by multiple actors over time and space. Today, ‘design-based’ planning approaches aim to create the same characteristics here and now. An example of such is the City of Gothenburg, Sweden, which strives to involve multiple actors to ‘design’ urban density and mixed use, but with unsatisfactory outcomes. There is reason to investigate in what way current planning approaches need modification to better translate policy goals into reality. This paper studied which type of planning approach appears to best deliver the desired urban characteristics. Two cities are studied, Gothenburg and Tokyo. Today, these cities operate under different main planning paradigms. Tokyo applies a rule-based approach and Gothenburg a design-based approach. Five urban areas were studied in each city, representing outcomes of three strategic planning approaches that have been applied historically in both cities: 1) emergent compact urban form; 2) designed dispersed urban form; and 3) designed compact urban form. Planning outcomes in the form of density, building scales and diversity were analysed to understand if such properties of density and diversity are best achieved by a specific planning approach. The results show that different planning approaches deliver very different outcomes when it comes to these qualities. To better support ambitions for compact cities in Gothenburg, the prevailing mix of ‘planning by design’ and ‘planning by developmental control’ needs to be complemented by a third planning strategy of ‘planning by coding’ or ‘rule-based planning’. This is critical to capacitate urban planning to accommodate parameters, such as timing, density, building scale diversity, and decentralization of planning and design activities to multiple actors

Historic Waterfront Restoration, Sustainability, and Urban Form: A Greener Master Plan For Pier 70 At The San Francisco Waterfront

This study explores the use of green areas as a method for integrating urban space and its applicability to waterfront reclamation, a specialized discipline focusing on the rehabilitation of industrial areas of ports. It also explores the philosophy of resource conservation and the integrative design solutions increasingly employed worldwide in projects of waterfront reclamation

Understanding Sustainability: A Social Studies Curriculum, Recommended for Grades 9 - 12

Understanding Sustainability: A Social Studies Curriculum, Recommended for Grades 9 - 12 This unit of study encourages students to explore a variety of topics related to global sustainability. Students will develop an understanding of important sustainability concepts and their interconnections, such as resource consumption, human population growth, and poverty and social equity. They will investigate historic examples of civilizations that failed to respond to gathering threats to the survival of their economies, societies, and natural environments. Drawing on the lessons of past civilization collapses, students will consider how to create a sustainable future for people in today’s local and global communities, taking into account both personal and structural solutions to current challenges. At the close of the unit, students will envision and design a sustainable future for themselves and others

The Daylight Imperative

Hospitals in the US are typically built as thick buildings due to a desire to optimize travel distances and functional relationships within and between clinical and supporting departments. However, this building configuration disconnects building occupants in core work areas from daylight and views to nature. It also promotes high energy consumption due to excessive use of artificial lighting and air-condition. Yet, having access to daylight and the view to nature in buildings is important for human health and wellbeing, especially in hospitals. Daylight regulates the body«s circadian rhythm, is necessary to produce Vitamin D, affects mood, lowers stress, increases concentration, and enables performance of visual tasks. Additionally, having access to daylight can improve the recovery process, it is effective as an antidepressant, and reduces pain. Furthermore, daylit hospitals have a great potential for energy savings, if their design integrates appropriate daylighting strategies and recognition of local climatic conditions. Future generations of hospital design need to become healthier places to deliver care, and become healthier for the planet by minimizing their significant impact on carbon driven climate change. Therefore, improving access to daylight and connections to nature should be a major design driver for hospital buildings and other large healthcare building typologies to protect the health of building occupants and support the 2030 challenge to protect global health and natural resources. An extensive literature review was conducted to study the impact of daylight in buildings on human health and wellbeing as well as the potential for energy savings. Architectural typologies used for hospital buildings in the US and Europe were explored for daylight penetration. Current hospital designs illustrate chances and challenges for providing daylight and views to the outside in core clinical areas. The increasingly dense and compressed footprints of US hospitals make it difficult to integrate daylight without moving to more perforated plans or narrow wings as employed in other parts of the world. The study of global best practices, together with literature research, were used as basis for the development of daylight design guidelines for future US hospitals, that meet the requirements of contemporary programs and codes. Guidelines that were developed include 1) Orientation and location, 2) Narrow building footprint, 3) Perforated thick building footprint, 4) Courtyards in patient, staff and public areas, 5) Shading, and 6) Skylights and clerestories in patient, staff and public areas. A design-proposal for a mid-size [146 bed] community hospital (one of the most common hospital types in the US), implementing the developed daylight-design guidelines, is presented as a test case. The Montgomery hospital replacement project in Norristown, Pennsylvania was picked to implement the thesis proposal on a challenging tight urban site to create a hospital based on the proposed concept: \u27Form Follows Daylight\u27

Staging urban emergence through collective creativity: Devising an outdoor mobile augmented reality tool

The unpredictability of global geopolitical conflicts, economic trends, and impacts of climate change, coupled with an increasing urban population, necessitates a more profound commitment to resilience thinking in urban planning and design. In contrast to top-down planning and designing for sustainability, allowing for emergence to take place seems to contribute to a capacity to better deal with this complex unpredictability, by allowing incremental changes through bottom-up, self-organized adaptation made by diverse actors in the proximity of various social, economical and functional entities in the urban context.The present thesis looks into the processes of creating urban emergence from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The theoretical section of the thesis first looks into the relationship between the processes and the qualities of a compact city. The Japanese city of Tokyo is used as an example of a resilient compact city that continuously emerges through incremental micro-adaptations by individual actors guided by urban rules that ‘let it happen’ without much central control or top-down design of the individual outcomes. The thesis then connects such rule-based emergent processes and the qualities of a compact city to complex adaptive system’s (CAS) theory, emphasizing the value of incremental and individual multiple-stakeholder input. The latter part of the thesis focuses on how to create a platform that can combine the bottom-up, emergent, rule-based planning approaches, and collective creativity based on individual participation and input from the public. This section is dedicated to developing a tool for a collaborative urban design using outdoor mobile augmented reality (MAR) by research-through-design method.The thesis thus has three parts addressing the topics: 1. urban planning processes and resulting urban qualities concerning compact city – i.e., density and diversity; 2. the processes of urban emergence, which generates complexity that renders urban resilience from the urban planning theory perspective; 3. developing a tool for non-expert citizens and other stakeholders to design and visualize an urban neighborhood by simulating the rule-based urban emergence using outdoor MAR. The results include a proposal for a complementary hybrid planning approaches that might approximate the CAS in urban systems with qualities that contribute to urban resiliency. Thereafter, the results describe specifications and design criteria for a tool as a public collaborative design platform using outdoor MAR to promote public participation: Urban CoBuilder. The processes of developing and prototyping such a tool to test various urban concepts concerning identified adaptive urban planning approaches are also presented with an assessment of the MAR tool based on focus group user tests. Future studies need to better include the potential of crowdsourcing public creativity through mass participation using the collaborative design tool and actual integration of these participatory design results in urban policies

The Revitalization of the American Downtown: A Network of Public Squares in Richmond, Virginia

In Europe, public squares are outdoor living rooms where people experience vibrant urban life in community with others. Well defined streets and squares work together to create a rich spatial experience for people moving through cities. American cities often lack this strong tradition of public space and experienced serious decline during the mid-20th century. Now as urban populations are increasing, it is time to re-invigorate the public realm of our urban areas. This thesis proposes an enhanced network of public squares in the downtown of Richmond, VA, a typical mid-sized city whose downtown is experiencing a resurgence. Using extensive precedent analysis, the investigation will apply design principles and typological characteristics to three proposed public squares in Richmond. The goals are to create catalysts for new development in the downtown and to encourage a renewed pedestrian experience of the city

Performance assessment of urban precinct design: a scoping study

Executive Summary: Significant advances have been made over the past decade in the development of scientifically and industry accepted tools for the performance assessment of buildings in terms of energy, carbon, water, indoor environment quality etc. For resilient, sustainable low carbon urban development to be realised in the 21st century, however, will require several radical transitions in design performance beyond the scale of individual buildings. One of these involves the creation and application of leading edge tools (not widely available to built environment professions and practitioners) capable of being applied to an assessment of performance across all stages of development at a precinct scale (neighbourhood, community and district) in either greenfield, brownfield or greyfield settings. A core aspect here is the development of a new way of modelling precincts, referred to as Precinct Information Modelling (PIM) that provides for transparent sharing and linking of precinct object information across the development life cycle together with consistent, accurate and reliable access to reference data, including that associated with the urban context of the precinct. Neighbourhoods are the ‘building blocks’ of our cities and represent the scale at which urban design needs to make its contribution to city performance: as productive, liveable, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive places (COAG 2009). Neighbourhood design constitutes a major area for innovation as part of an urban design protocol established by the federal government (Department of Infrastructure and Transport 2011, see Figure 1). The ability to efficiently and effectively assess urban design performance at a neighbourhood level is in its infancy. This study was undertaken by Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, CSIRO and buildingSMART Australasia on behalf of the CRC for Low Carbon Living

Ecosystem Services, Green Infrastructure and Spatial Planning

National governments hardly identify their ecological networks or make an effort to integrate them into their spatial policies and plans. Under this perspective, an important scientific and technical issue is to focus on preserving corridors for enabling species mobility and on achieving connectivity between natural protected areas. This Special Issue takes a step forward insofar as it aims at proposing a theoretical and methodological discussion on the definition and implementation of ecological networks that provide a wide range of ecosystem services

Building Ownership, Renovation Investments, and Energy Performance—A Study of Multi-Family Dwellings in Gothenburg

The European building stock was renewed at a rapid pace during the period 1950–1975. In many European countries, the building stock from this time needs to be renovated, and there are opportunities to introduce energy efficiency measures in the renovation process. information availability and increasingly available analysis tools make it possible to assess the impact of policy and regulation. This article describes methods developed for analyzing investments in renovation and energy performance based on building ownership and inhabitant socio-economic information developed for Swedish authorities, to be used for the Swedish national renovations strategy in 2019. This was done by analyzing measured energy usage and renovation investments made during the last 30 years, coupled with building specific official information of buildings and resident area characteristics, for multi-family dwellings in Gothenburg (N = 6319). The statistical analyses show that more costly renovations lead to decreasing energy usage for heating, but buildings that have been renovated during the last decades have a higher energy usage when accounting for current heating system, ownership, and resident socio-economic background. It is appropriate to include an affordability aspect in larger renovation projects since economically disadvantaged groups are over-represented in buildings with poorer energy performance