A planning environment for the design of future cities

Abstract

In the global context, the population of cities and urbanized areas has developed from a minority to become the majority. Now cities are the largest, most complex and most dynamic man-made systems. They are vibrant centres of cultural life and engines that drive local and global economies. Yet, contemporary urbanized areas are environmentally, socially and economically unsustainable entities laying increasing pressure on the surrounding rural areas. Traditional methods of planning and managing large cities that lead to this situation have reached their limits. The planning and design processes therefore need a radical re-thinking. On the computational side, this necessitates the integration of new methods and instruments. On the planning and design side, this requires the involvement of stakeholders and decision makers much earlier than normally done in the past. The combination of interactive design and computation will demonstrate the effects and side effects of urban-rural planning or re-development. We build our design research approach on dynamics and scale: viewing cities and settlements as entities with dynamic urban metabolisms, we propose to apply stocks and flows simulations to the building scale (small, S-Scale), to the urban scale (medium, M-Scale), and to the territorial scale (large, L-Scale). Our long-term goal is the sustainable urban-rural system. Planning and implementation examples from Switzerland and ETH Zurich Science City serve as test cases, with the intent to use the findings for developments in other parts of the world. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.