The City of Tomorrow from... the Data of Today

In urban planning, a common unit of measure for housing density is the number of households per hectare. However, the actual size of the physical space occupied by a household, i.e., a dwelling, is seldom considered, neither in 2D nor in 3D. This article proposes a methodology to estimate the average size of a dwelling in existing urban areas from available open data, and to use it as one of the design parameters for new urban-development projects. The proposed unit of measure, called “living space”, includes outdoor and indoor spaces. The idea is to quantitatively analyze the city of today to help design the city of tomorrow. First, the “typical”-dwelling size and a series of Key Performance Indicators are computed for all neighborhoods from a semantic 3D city model and other spatial and non-spatial datasets. A limited number of neighborhoods is selected based on their similarities with the envisioned development plan. The size of the living space of the selected neighborhoods is successively used as a design parameter to support the computer-assisted generation of several design proposals. Each proposal can be exported, shared, and visualized online. As a test case, a to-be-planned neighborhood in Amsterdam, called “Sloterdijk One”, has been chosen