Digital Masterplanning: Computing Urban Design

The digital revolution has finally reached urban design as one of the last design communities not very familiar with computing. This is despite the city and geography being the natural fields for systems analogy and digital models of mathematical and statistical simulation were developed in the 60s and 70s for urban planning, much before industrial or architectural design. The recent arrival of urban design simulations is however not as innovative and radical as their 50 year old counterparts since they use computing solely for policy visualization, quantity evaluation or pattern generation. The Computational Design and Research Group [CDR] at Aedas|R&D started in 2007 to develop an open platform of lightweight applications ñ Digital Masterplanning ñ in collaboration with partners from academia and industry to provide methods for urban design, based on computational methods called meta-heuristic algorithms. An attempt to encode empirical knowledge and design assumptions into simulations is described where designers can assemble the resulting applications according to scales and brief into custom workflows