Simulation Heuristics for Urban Design

Designing simulations for urban design not only requires explicit performance criteria of planning standards but a synthesis of implicit design objectives, that we will call ‘purpose rules’, with computational approaches. The former would at most lead to automation of the existing planning processes for speed and evaluation, the latter to an understanding of perceived urban qualities and their effect on the planning of cities.

In order to transform purpose rules into encoded principles we argue that the focus should not be on defining parametric constraints and quantities, but on aligning the perceptual properties of the simulations with the strategies of the stakeholders (planner/ urban designer/ architect/ developer/ community).

Using projects from the Computational Design and Research group at Aedas [CDR] as examples, this chapter will discuss how an open framework of lightweight applications with simple functionality can be integrated into the design and planning process by using computational simulations as urban design heuristics.