Digital masterplanning: computing urban design

Abstract

The digital revolution has finally reached urban design as one of the last design communities not particularly familiar with computing. This is despite the city and geography being the natural fields for systems analogy and digital models of mathematical and statistical simulation having been developed in the 1960s and 1970s for urban planning, much before industrial or architectural design. The recently introduced urban design simulations are, however, not as innovative and radical as their 50-year-old counterparts, since they use computing solely for policy visualisation, quantity evaluation or pattern generation. The Computational Design and Research Group at Aedas|R&D in 2007 began to develop an open platform of lightweight applications – digital masterplanning – in collaboration with partners from academia and industry to provide methods for urban design, based on computational methods called meta-heuristic algorithms. An attempt to encode empirical knowledge and design assumptions into simulations is described where designers can assemble the resulting applications according to scales and brief into custom workflows.