Urban Planning Tools Research Articles

Digging up the Past: Re-Visiting the Potential Role Green Roofs can Play in Mitigating the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect: A Case Study of the Central Business District (CBD), Durban, South Africa

Across the world, cities and densely populated areas are striving to both uplift the quality of the environment as well as enhance their sustainability. Part of this endeavour entails the promotion of urban greening. In Durban, on the east coast of South Africa, rooftop greening practices are gaining some traction with a view to achieving the sustainable development of a greener environment for the city and surrounding areas, although on a smaller scale than many other cities. There has been little empirical research done on green roofs within a local context, especially concerning green roofs as green infrastructure in urban planning tools for creating sustainable resilient city spaces by helping them mitigate against climate change. The quantitative analysis of this research measured temperatures and the urban heat island effect (UHI) of green roofs, as well as control sites over a seven-year period. The total average temperature differences over a seven-year period during the summer months (January/February) witnessed one green roof measuring 9.2 degrees Celsius lower than the control roof. The rationale for this research was to offer support for the benefits of green roofs in mitigating against an increase in inner-city heat islands in the case of Durban’s Central Business District (CBD).

A crime risk-based approach for urban planning. A methodological proposal

The issue of urban security is of great importance in city policies and a prerequisite for the creation of sustainable cities and communities. The pursuit of secure conditions requires the integration of different existing approaches in order to achieve effective and lasting results. The methodology focuses on the crime risk concept, for which no instrument currently available in Literature provides an unambiguous definition or complete assessment. The aim of the research is the definition of a risk model in which the different security approaches converge and maximise their synergy through the construction of a Spatial Composite Crime Risk Index (IRc), structured according to the disaster risk paradigm. Its spatial nature allows the spatial component of crime risk to be highlighted. The associated crime risk map gives a snapshot of the risk conditions in the area under study. It highlights the presence, the magnitude and the superficial extension of the critical areas for which appropriate intervention strategies can be envisaged. The model was applied to the city of Milan. The quantitative result obtained, i.e. the crime risk map, confirms the usefulness and effectiveness of introducing the latter into the information layers used when defining Urban Planning tools. This would allow an in-depth analysis of the territory through the construction of risk scenarios.

Convergence of the materialistic and idealistic in the methodology of urban planning

The realities of the present require changes and development of urban methodology as a science of methods covering the entire methodological chain – from clarifying concepts, streamlining tasks and establishing characteristics of objects to methods of analysis, evaluation and justification of decisions, and urban planning design and management of urban development. The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth understanding of the methodology of urbanism in the context of convergence (rapprochement, interconnection, interpenetration) of materialistic and idealistic approaches, and to streamline and develop methodological tools for urban planning. Urban planning activity is considered a set of purposes, criteria, priorities, and constraints. The multiplicity of purposes – strategic, tactical, regulatory, and criteria – necessitates changes in methodology, analysis and assessment of spatial situations, and justification of decisions, including the requirements of multicriteria. The design of territorial systems is oriented towards integrated development, increasing the validity and efficiency of the implementation of the concepts of their spatial organisation. The study is methodological – it emphasises the significance of improving the methodological culture and developing the urbanist’s systemic thinking (reflection, worldview), their creative potential and the set of professional knowledge, skills and abilities to implement projects and other functions of professional activity. It is extremely important in the era of large databases and the Internet, changes in planning and research practices, increased capacity and depth of information analysis, and the emergence of new techniques and procedures. Integration of new research methods should be designed to obtain new knowledge about processes and phenomena, establish regularities and increase the validity of the principles of organisation, functioning and development of urbanised systems and territories

Narrowing the Implementation Gap

Developing new digital tools to fit the needs of communicative urban and green area planning requires understanding of the various prospective user groups, the different contexts of use, the planning tasks, and the communicative activities at hand. However, it is not self-evident that user research can be applied in research and innovation projects with limited human and time resources. In this article, a user-centered design (UCD) approach is applied in the development of new collaborative 3D tools for urban and green area planning in a multidisciplinary research team in the GreenTwins project. This research shows how essential it is to select easy-to-learn user research methods, identify the knowledge needs for tool development, and ensure that user insight is transmitted to development. In the GreenTwins project, this was achieved by applying a simple UCD framework (PACT) and engaging the research and development team in the process. Despite the challenges, the results show that the methodology used was beneficial.

A Circularity Mapping Framework for Urban Policymaking

In the context of urban policies, the circular economy can represent a virtuous model of sustainable and efficient management of resources and services for citizens, generating value for the community. Local policymakers play a central role in accelerating the circular economy transition, given that they organize and manage services that can significantly contribute to urban resilience. For policies to be properly designed, tools aimed at supporting territorial planning are needed to direct local policy towards choices that favor the circular economy and the resilience of cities. Among these urban planning tools, it is particularly important to have dashboards of comparative data on the degree of implementation of the circular economy. This paper provides a circularity mapping framework to map the degree of circularity and identify cities' strengths and weaknesses to design policies accordingly using a data-driven approach. Using a circular economy model based on 5 circular economy pillars, we identified 28 variables and assigned them to each of the pillars according to the variable's scope: sustainable inputs, social sharing, Product as a service, environmental policies, and resource efficiency. Both partial scores based on the five circular economy pillars, and a circularity index are provided for benchmarking and positioning analysis. Since urban life's environmental, economic, and social aspects are intertwined, only an integrated strategy can result in successful urban sustainable development. The paper supports policymakers in creating the conditions for efficient production and consumption markets and resource management systems while designing incentives and communications to citizens to support bottom-up initiatives and encourage virtuous behavior.

Developing a smart tool for integrated climate action planning (ICLAP 2050) in Asia-Pacific Cities

In light of the growing global environmental challenges, smart cities need to serve as testing workshops or labs to smartly tackle complex cross-sectional issues like jobs, seamless mobility, safety and security, sustained growth, while responding to the impending climate change too. This necessitates for developing a smart model or tool that integrates such varied but crucial climate concerns of a city into its direct decision-making and long-term planning. In this research, we conduct a literature review to have an overview of the state-of-the-affairs on urban climate planning in Asia-Pacific Cities covering China, Japan, India, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. This is followed by an intensive theoretical understanding on the need of having a smart tool in urban climate action planning. This includes the study of recent urban climate metrics and tools, their different typologies based on key purpose, method, sectoral and geographical scope, and challenges and gaps in formulating smart urban climate tools. We then introduce the conceptual framework for integrated climate action planning (ICLAP) tool that transects spatial, statistical and bibliometric methods. We establish applicability of ICLAP in case of Indian cities by discerning climate vulnerabilities, GHG trends and relevant urban climate solutions. The paper eventually culminates with major scientific findings and policy recommendations, essentially underscoring more intensive and wider application of ICLAP like smart urban climate tools in local decision making and national urban policies duly supported by international scientific collaborations.

Land Use Efficiency and Value Capture

This article aims to relate intrinsic aspects of urban planning that are becoming increasingly important both within the international scientific debate and within urban planning tools. These aspects are land consumption and land value capture. Their centrality is given by the growing importance that in recent years have assumed the aspects related to the sustainable development of settlements. This article aims to summarize the main theories regarding the relationship between the efficiency of land use and the policies of capturing public value. The reference scenario is dictated by sustainable development policies that, if contextualized in the sphere of urban development, imply a rational use of resources to ensure the formation of resilient, safe, and inclusive settlements. This aspect introduces the existing link between urban form and sustainability. It is therefore understood how the achievement of the targets set at the international level are implemented in local urban policies. For this reason, many scholars have argued that the challenge of adapting to new pressures, such as climate change, necessarily means creating efficient urban settlements. The question becomes: which land use can be considered more efficient than the others? This article intends to answer this question by investigating the main theories that have tried to define the mechanisms and methods of comparison of different urban development scenarios. The article goes on to reconstruct the steps that have helped to evaluate urban development according to purely fiscal aspects up to the introduction of qualitative aspects related to public value. To do so, it analyzes the terms and tools related to the concepts of public value and the capture of public value and attempts to synthesize the main theories and research in the sector.

Interactive soundscape simulation as a co-design tool for urban professionals

Urban professionals are regularly confronted with the complexity of urban sound experiences and have long expressed interest in better sound design opportunities. But, in many urban environments, the common approach based on noise mitigation has proven insufficient to improve the quality of the auditory experience. However, urban professionals rarely have the resources and knowledge to deal with urban sound in a resource-centered manner and to make space for perceptual and contextual suitability for a diversity of experiences. To start bridging this gap, the present research explores the potential of a soundscape simulator prototype to help integrate sound into the urban design process. Through a formative evaluation with urban professionals during an interactive workshop, this study reveals avenues for the development of a simulation tool for urban professionals, including the need to balance flexibility and accuracy, to present changes in real time, and to seamlessly switch between different compositions to support design comparisons. Our findings also hint at a shift away from the visual-centeredness and a willingness amongst urban professionals to consider a more holistic urban sensory experience. We conclude with recommendations for a sound simulation tool for urban planning.

Community gardens as a response to the contradictions of sustainable urban policy: Insights from the Swiss cities of Zurich and Lausanne

In this paper we explore how policy discourses on urban sustainability impact the governing of urban food gardening in favoring community gardens. Our main hypothesis is that community gardens better accommodate the tensions created by the discourses of the compact and green city compared to other types of food gardening, especially allotment gardens. In the context of the Swiss cities of Lausanne and Zurich, analysis of policy documents confirms this hypothesis by identifying four frames that orient policies toward favoring community gardening: (i) Adapting green space planning to densification favors community gardening with their modest, flexible and multifunctional design, (ii) Revaluating the role of urban food gardening in urban sustainability represents community gardening as a new multifunctional benchmark, (iii) Reorganizing urban food gardening fosters diversity in gardening opportunities which in turn supports a variety of forms of community gardening, (iv) Justifying urban food gardening through public values and needs supports community gardening with their cost-efficient green space management, lower land management and more active citizen participation. In this vein, urban policymakers continually turn to community gardens as a strategic urban planning tool that gives urban green space greater legitimacy in the wake of the densifying city. Overall, urban food gardens continue to be negotiated between space-related marginalization and socio-political significance serving different needs to urban citizens. This results in the need of a more sophisticated planning approach considering different types of urban gardens related to their location in the built city, associated functions, and user groups.

The Spaces of Social Services as Social Infrastructure: Insights From a Policy-Innovation Project in Milan

The spatial organisation of social services has long been residual for both urban planning and social welfare policies in Italian cities. This often results in randomly chosen locations and poor design arrangements, which ignore the role that space might play in fostering social life and inclusion. The scarce relevance given to the topic both in research and implementation is connected to the historical evolution of social services in the country and the scant resources devoted to their provision. Basing itself on the debate on welfare spaces and social infrastructures and drawing on a collaborative-research experience within an experimental policy-innovation project developed in Milan, this article tackles the role of space in social services provision following three directions. Firstly, it analyses how, at the urban level, welfare innovations and the interplay between urban planning and welfare policies might contribute to reshaping the traditional physical structures of social services and their map to favour more inclusive patterns of access to local welfare. Secondly, it investigates the role of social services as social infrastructures in increasing accessibility, reducing stigmatisation, and interpreting in a more inclusive way the complex public-private partnerships that allow welfare implementation nowadays. Finally, it discusses how, in the face of contemporary trends in the activation of welfare spaces, traditional urban planning tools are challenged in monitoring their increasingly dynamic distribution in the city. This highlights the need to develop innovative urban planning strategies and tools to effectively support decision-making and design.

Micromunicipality (MM) and Inner Areas in Italy: A Challenge for National Land Policy

The following paper examines urban and territorial planning in Italy, where decision-making is entrusted almost exclusively to the almost 8000 small municipalities present in the country. Plans for and the transformation of built-up areas, infrastructure and social services of all types, and serving all purposes in a national territory of more than 300,000 square kilometers, are controlled by a multitude of Mayors, Boards and Municipal Councils that govern plots of land consisting of polygons of a few kilometers per side. This is generally achieved using urban planning tools developed without any general rule or protocol. Often, most of their content is even ignored as a result of national legislation that weakens them, making them largely irrelevant. This is a European example of urban mismanagement that should be brought to the wider attention of the European technical–scientific community because the debate developed so far on this topic—even by eminent and authoritative urban planners—has been almost entirely published in Italian only. Public and political attention around the issue is still extremely limited, although the serious effects of this “molecular planning” are beginning to be perceived: unjustified overurbanization and very disorganized, extremely energy-intensive and ecosystemically destructive urban layouts that are completely at odds with the public interests of environmental and urban quality. In the following paper, we make some comparisons with other European countries and outline some possible directions—certainly very difficult to follow—to rethink and remedy these negative effects.

How to optimize the 2D/3D urban thermal environment: Insights derived from UAV LiDAR/multispectral data and multi-source remote sensing data

The systematical exploration of how two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) features of urban landscapes influence land surface temperature (LST) is still limited. Therefore, we investigated the influence of three main urban landscapes—urban green space, impervious land, and water bodies on LST, with a particular focus on the 3D vegetation metrics of green volume (GV) and leaf area index (LAI). We used Yinchuan City, China, as a case study. We quantified the impacts of various 2D/3D metrics of the three landscape types on LST using a random forest analysis with multiple sources, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing images. We then generated a Bayesian Network (BN) model to identify the optimal configurations for each landscape type. We found that using 11 of the 31 metrics considered, our model could explain 81.8% of the observed variance in LST of Yinchuan City. Among those, water body metrics were the most important, followed by vegetation abundance, impervious land metrics, and landscape pattern of urban green space. The mean classification error of the BN model was only 22.9%. We suggest that this makes the BN model a promising support tool for urban planning with a view to urban heat island mitigation. Our findings also stress the importance of considering both 2D and 3D features when considering urban cooling strategies.

The Process of Digitalization of the Urban Environment for the Development of Sustainable and Circular Cities: A Case Study of Bologna, Italy

The residential heritage that was built during the great expansion of real estate after the Second World War has severe deficiencies in structural safety, fire resistance, energy efficiency, and accessibility and these cannot be solved with sustainable renovation measures. This study focuses on replacement interventions and promotes a management model that addresses three areas (technical, social, and economic) and it refers to the application of the circularity principle to the construction sector for the goal of climate neutrality by 2050. The final objective is to define a protocol—namely, the guidelines—to reference in a decision-making process that promotes urban regeneration by comparing demolition with reconstruction and renovation. The proposed methodology allows for the determination of suitable areas in Bologna for replacement and the joining of the municipal geodatabase with data from archival research on building permits in 1949–1965 by using GIS software. This digital archive can be implemented in a digital twin for an urban block, which can become a predictive tool for urban planning and the management of the whole life of a building. The main result is the characterization of urban blocks by identifying typical features belonging to specific building libraries that are validated with density analyses. These urban clusters and building archetypes can be used to assess targeted intervention measures by using specific tools, such as predictive maps and 3D city models.

The infrastructure transition canvas: A tool for strategic urban infrastructure planning

Increasing pressures resulting from global environmental and societal changes urge cities to adapt their infrastructures. Strategic planning in local governments and utilities has to anticipate these challenges and translate them into innovation and investment strategies. In this setting, a multitude of actors, their interests, and value orientations have to be considered in decision-making. Else, innovation projects are likely to meet resistance and fail. We outline how business model thinking can help navigate the roles and interests of a variety of stakeholders in nature-based infrastructure implementation. This leads to proposing the tool of 'Infrastructure Transition Canvas' (ITC), which draws on insights from business model innovation, and its recent uptake by transition scholars. Potential benefits of applying the ITC are illustrated by the case of urban stormwater management in Germany. We discuss how the ITC may support complex investment decisions, and pave the way to sustainable urban infrastructure transitions.

From satellite interferometry displacements to potential damage maps: A tool for risk reduction and urban planning

Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) is a consolidated tool for detecting and monitoring ground surface displacements. The availability of satellite data with free access policy and high monitoring capabilities (in terms of resolution and acquisition frequency) is increasing. Moreover, the first continental displacement map of Europe will be freely available in quarter one 2022 by the latest Copernicus Service, the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS). The EGMS will provide ground displacement maps, updated every year, delivering valuable information to a wide range of users, such as public or governmental institutions, industry, academia, and citizens. This vast amount of information needs semi-automatic tools and methodologies to derive user-oriented products that can be easily used by land use and urban planning decision-makers, who are often unfamiliar with PSI. This work proposes a semi-automatic procedure to identify damage prone areas in urban environments from wide-area PSI displacement maps. The proposed method identifies the most significant Active Deformation Areas (ADAs) to calculate three products based on the displacement intensity gradient: the Gradient Intensity Map, the Gradient Vectors and Time Series, and the Potential Damage Map. These products allow identifying buildings and urban structures exposed to potential damage, which could be followed by a more detailed building-based vulnerability and risk assessment. The methodology has been applied to an area of the province of Granada (Andalucía, Spain) but it can be applied to any other urban environment where PSI displacement maps are available. To demonstrate the advantages and limitations of the proposed method, results are discussed in five coastal resorts (Cerro Gordo, Punta de la Mona, Marina del Este, Alfa Mar, and Monte de los Almendros), strongly affected by slope movements. The methodology allowed to derive 175 ADAs from about 200,000 measurement points. About 15% of the resulting area has been found to correspond to high or very high gradient intensity class, and 192 out of 633 buildings have been identified to be prone to moderate or high potential damage. A damage prediction test has been realized through Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis, based on a damage inventory map derived from field surveys. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology to localize damaged or potentially damaged buildings, substantially reducing the time of analysis.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SMART URBAN PLANNING FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF SMARTS CITIES

This article has smart cities as its theme and aims to identify the role and importance of urban planning as an instrument for the realization of smart cities. This research is bibliographical and presents the historical context of urban planning as well as concepts of sustainability, security and egalitarian distribution within this scenario, advancing to the concepts of smart cities, their definitions and how they relate to urban planning. The study presents and reflects on the importance of the smart urban planning tool as a protagonist for the construction of really effective smart cities in the promotion of sustainable, safe cities that provide well-being for their inhabitants.

Mapping evapotranspirative and radiative cooling services in an urban environment

As impervious surfaces have seized most areas in cities worldwide, urban heat island (UHI) has become a global concern. Urban green infrastructures (UGI) are crucial to providing microclimate regulation and thermal comfort through evapotranspiration (ET) and shading. High-spatiotemporal-resolution ET maps are required to plan and manage UGI to mitigate the UHI and droughts. We propose a method using open-access data, including hourly meteorological data and remote sensing vegetation parameters, to predict heat fluxes using a soil-vegetation-atmosphere model. The ET prediction accuracy was assessed using eddy covariance towers, showing an R2 of 0.84 for the residential-vegetated site and 0.57 for the built-up site during 2019. A greening cooling service index (GCoS), divided into evapotranspirative (ECoS) and radiative (RCoS) cooling effects were mapped for Berlin, Germany. Almost half of the population and 21% of the city area are located in low GCoS (<0.25). Based upon climate change scenarios, a rise in temperature increases the annual ET, while plant stress and droughts considerably decrease overall cooling services. Simulation of climatological scenarios and plant traits can help to define more suitable species adapted for urban environments. The presented method provides an effective decision-making tool for urban planning to reduce heat risk for urban residents.

Urban Planning for Climate Change: A Toolkit of Actions for an Integrated Strategy of Adaptation to Heavy Rains, River Floods, and Sea Level Rise

Cities and urban systems are the places most responsible for climate change, but at the same time they are the places where its effects are felt the most. A state-of-the-art analysis showed that Ecological–Environmental, Settlement, and Infrastructure and Service Systems are the components of cities most exposed to risk phenomena. Therefore, it is important to identify site-specific actions aimed at enhancing ecosystem services and building hierarchical ecological networks (green and blue infrastructures), according to an Ecosystem-based Approach (EbA). In this regard, the contribution presents the results of a research work on the theme of multi-risks connected to climate change, referring to heavy rains and river flood phenomena and sea level rise and proposes a systematisation of international best practices in the field of the Ecosystem-based Approach (EbA). Each best practice analysed is traced back to the three urban resilience macro-strategies of “defence”, “adaptation”, and “relocation/de-anthropisation”, already conceptualised by the authors during their joint research activity. The aim is to outline a synthetic toolkit of site-specific design actions, exportable to other contexts, intended as a tool to support the innovation of urban planning tools at the local level.

Establishing an Air Quality Index Based on Proxy Data for Urban Planning Part 1: Methodological Developments and Preliminary Tests

In the last few decades, urban planning has expanded regarding environmental considerations. However, air quality, which is regarded as an important aspect of the green development of cities, is not considered in urban planning. This research aims to propose a tool to easily introduce air quality considerations into urban projects. Nowadays, the usual air pollutants (NOx, PM, SO2, and O3) are measured via sophisticated monitoring stations—or even low-cost devices—to give near-real-time air quality indices. However, stations are not adapted to local air pollution and real-time data are not helpful for planning purposes. An index able to rank areas and projects based on urban “air proxy data” would help decision makers. This paper presents how to create an air quality index as a decision support tool for urban planning. No pollutant measurement campaign will be necessary and only data that are easily accessible, even to nonexperts, are used. This paper describes the methodological development of an index that we call AQOI (Air Quality Observed Index), and the results obtained for four different locations (industrial, urban, and rural) considered as preliminary tests.

Coupling of Cellular Automata Urban Growth Model and HEC-HMS to Predict Future Flood Extents in the Upper Klang Ampang Catchment

Urban areas in tropical regions have higher flood risks due to the more frequent occurrence of intense convective rainfalls. The rising urbanization process have caused more surfaces to be covered with impervious materials, resulting in increased runoff. Modelling urban growth and its impact on urban hydrology is essential to ensure informed decision in the sustainable management and planning of cities in developing country like Malaysia. The aim of this research is to develop an integrated system for simulating future flood extents by coupling flood and urban growth models for the Upper Klang Ampang catchment which includes Kuala Lumpurcapital city. HEC-HMS was used for flood modelling while SLEUTH cellular automata model was employed to analyse urban growth in the catchment. The results indicate that using historical satellite images from 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2016 as input data layers alongwith slope, land use, hill shade, road and restricted area layers, a slight increase in urban growth from 2020 until 2050 is predicted which can cause the peak discharge to increase by about 11-15%. The integrated flood estimation-urban growth system can be used as an effective tool in urban planning and management for the city.