Design grammars

Successful sustainable urban planning has to deal with existing demands in urban design connected to a highly complex system in every direction of business a planner could think of. Furthermore, reality frequently overtakes ongoing planning. These circumstances are especially severe for the urban planning of mega cities, where sustainability must be in the focus of interest for several reasons. “Green lungs”, as one example supporting sustainability within urban environments enhance the functionality of cities to balance humidity locally, to shade buildings and sites and to enable public recreation as well as to reduce air pollution directly and indirectly. This quantitatively and qualitatively less explored branch of urban design requires complex and time consuming modeling tasks even on a master planning scope. In this paper we describe a novel method to create sustainable urban vegetation designs automatically as a kind of early simulation step, which can be used as a guideline for following master planning tasks of high-density urban environments. We had formalized sustainability criteria available in current planning knowledge into CGA shape grammar, which had been introduced by [1]. Additionally, we extended these urban planning rule sets with defined urban landscape patterns. We use these patterns with a procedurally model rule-based distribution and placement of vegetation as well as landscape objects to generate sustainable urban environments. We also show how to use a shape grammar in combination with procedural methods that iteratively develop an urban design, automatically creating more and more details in order to plan sustainable cities more effectively. We link the use of patterns [2] and the design possibilities of shape grammars to plan sustainable design. As results, we present the simulated master plans of different sustainable urban environments in different climates. This paper evolves out of a recent paper [3] of the authors with a strong similarity in section 1-5. Exception: The contributed work is extended by the use of design grammars suited for sustainable design. The extensions adhere especially to the application of design patterns in the context of sustainable master planning and are focused but not limited to vegetation scenarios.