Environmental performance-based community development: A parametric simulation framework for smart growth development in the United States

Abstract

Smart Growth is an urban design movement initiated by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States (Smart Growth America, 2019). The regulations of Smart Growth control urban morphologies such as building height, use, position, section configurations, façade configurations, and materials, which have an explicit association with energy performances. This research aims to analyze and visualize the impact of Smart Growth developments on environmental performances. This paper presents a parametric modeling and simulation framework for Smart Growth developments that can model the potential community development scenarios, simulate the environmental footprints of each parcel, and visualize the results of modeling and simulation. We implemented and examined the proposed framework through a case study of two Smart Growth regulations: Columbia Unified Development Code (UDC) in Missouri (City of Columbia Missouri, 2017) and Overland Park Downtown Form-based Code (FBC) in Kansas City (City of Overland Park, 2017, 2019). Last, we discuss the implementation results, the limitations of the proposed framework, and the future work. We anticipate that the proposed method can improve stakeholders' understanding of how Smart Growth developments are associated with potential environmental footprints from an expeditious and thorough exploration of what-if scenarios of the multiple development schemes.