Evaluation and Reliability of Shape Grammars for Urban Planning and Network Design

Abstract

Shape grammars are increasingly applied in urban simulations and are promising tools for urban design, e.g., in procedural modeling. Shape grammars are interdisciplinary, straightforward, understandable planning tools, which potentially have the chance to overcome the complexity of urban design. Applications of grammars and rule-based methods could be found in cognate fields of architecture, urban and transport planning, geometry, and also in mathematics, and computer sciences. Applications of shape grammars are described exemplarily for various fields of science. It is found that often a profound evaluation of the effect of certain shape grammar rules is missing in literature. Therefore, a set of four approaches is proposed in this chapter (1) to establish theory of grammars and rule-based approaches, (2) to evaluate existing shape grammar rules, (3) to generate and extract new shape grammars, and (4) to verify complex system wide shape grammars. The four approaches are exemplarily applied in the field of road transport network design; however, migration to urban planning and architecture seems promising for future applications. Reliability is addressed in the evaluation methods to tackle uncertainties in planning.