Developing a theory of an object-oriented city: Building energy for urban problems

Abstract

The paper reviews the processes of Geodesign, as it is currently used in practice, and explore its capability and limitation to adapt to new smart city design and technology. Predictions about the future city are being attempted based on data that is for all intents and purposes based on the distant past. In the smart city, where data is both ubiquitous and continuous, it is possible to use metadata to quickly gain an understanding of how the future city is designed and how the current urban system can be altered. Existing building energy data of eight housing units in the Sumida neighborhood of Tokyo was collected using smart meters. This data was analyzed to determine how the buildings perform in real-time, compared to how the energy models predict the building performance. This comparison showed that the existing buildings are using more energy than the current models predict. There is potential that better utilizing data can help designers and planners come closer to meeting community goals. There is also potential that as we integrate more smart city technologies into our cities for improving future city model, or the change model in Geodesign. This paper discussed how other variables that can be incorporated into larger-scale problems, in which an object-oriented city design model is proposed based on a network of objects and multiple system boundaries.