Urban performance and density: Generative study on interdependencies of urban form and environmental measures

Abstract

Majority of the world population live in urban settlements where for the city dwellers, the quality of life is directly influenced by the environmental conditions as a result of the built environment. The environmental conditions on the public realm and in the buildings, shape how people use outdoor and indoor spaces in their daily life. Correspondingly, the present study implements a generative approach to link urban physical density to performative urban design to investigate the environmental impacts of urban morphology. This approach could be beneficial to implement performance-based planning (PBP), as a method for climate change adaptation and environmental resilience, to improve citizens’ wellbeing. Selected performance measures for this study are: nocturnal Urban Heat Island effect, outdoor solar access (for winter and summer) and indoor daylight availability. The results are analyzed based on the mathematical correlations between building form factors and environmental qualities, within varying range of generated building densities. The study shows that, in the case of buildings with square foot print, maximum potential UHI is highly dependent on height of the urban canyon and optimum outdoor solar access during summer is achievable with intermediate canyon width. Daylight variations mainly depend on window to wall ratio (WWR). In addition, with high WWR values (0.7), canyon height and building geometry sequentially have the highest influence on indoor daylight availability.