A Grammar-Based Optimization Approach for Designing Urban Fabrics and Locating Amenities for 15-Minute Cities

Abstract

Providing pedestrian accessibility to urban services is a big challenge and a key factor in creating more walkable urban areas. Moreover, it is a critical aspect of climate-resilient urban planning as it is broadly assumed that neighborhoods with greater walkability discourage automobile use and reduce CO2 emissions. The idea of 15-minute cities, defined as urban environments where most places that residents need to access are within a 15-minute walk, is gaining increasing attention worldwide. Because aspects of urban performance are increasingly quantifiable, generative, and data-driven design approaches can explore broader sets of potential solutions, while optimization can help identify designs with desired properties. This work demonstrates and tests a new approach that combines shape grammars, a formal method for shape generation that facilitates the elaboration of complex patterns and meaningful solutions, with multi-objective optimization. The goal was to optimize the design of urban fabric layouts and the location of amenities to provide 15-minute neighborhood configurations that minimize infrastructure cost (as estimated by cumulative street length) and the number of amenities, while maximizing pedestrian accessibility to urban services (as assessed by overall integration and the average distance from all plots to nearest amenities).