Generative Urban Design
Affinity with (or deep interest in) 3D modelling, geometry and topology, computer science, and mathematics (linear algebra and graph theory in particular) is expected. However, the project is not purely technical but also applied, and so, the student is expected to be familiar with or willing to research planning processes and approaches to participatory decision-making.
Generative Design is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches to the derivation of topological-geometric configurations directly from the design requirements and goals in a feedforward process that can be through mathematical optimization, gamified exploration, or grammatical construction of designs [1] & [5]. The design goals and requirements in the context of climatic design can be related to the trade-offs between energy efficiency and [visual-climatic] comfort, among other environmental human factors [2] & [8]. The so-called Right to Light in Great Britain, the European standard EN 17037 “Daylight in Buildings”, and similar design codes or standards of good practice provide recommendations for ensuring the rights of property owners to receive sunlight, daylight, sky view, and the like [3], [4], & [6]. In view of the possibility of installing solar panels on buildings, the same rights can also be seen as a basis for the renewable energy capture potential of buildings. In relatively dense urban contexts, not only is the spatial context typically occluding the sky view and thus restricting the sunlight hours of buildings, but also the building itself becomes an occlusion to its neighbourhood and even itself. Thus, in a turn from normative design regulations concerned with giving static directives as to what needs to be done to guarantee adherence to standards, we propose to generate the design guidelines in the form of an environmental envelope for a building based on what needs to be attained in terms of solar-climatic requirements and goals. The idea is to develop a computational methodology and implement it as a tool, working with voxel-based 3D city models [7] or 2.5D Digital Surface Models (DSMs) sourced from Earth Observation datasets (such as those from the ESA or DLR).
The goal is to devise a computational methodology and implement it in Python (NumPy/SciPy family of libraries). Methods from geometric optics, computer graphics, linear algebra, graph theory, and mathematical programming will have to be used to develop this methodology. Familiarity with geodata processing methods and libraries in Python is assumed.
[1] Nourian, P., Azadi, S., Oval, R. (2023). Generative Design in Architecture: From Mathematical Optimization to Grammatical Customization. In: Kyratsis, P., Manavis, A., Davim, J.P. (eds) Computational Design and Digital Manufacturing. Management and Industrial Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21167-6_1, [URL]
[2] Shach-Pinsly, Dalit, and Isaac Guedi Capeluto. “From Form-Based to Performance-Based Codes.” Sustainability 12, no. 14 (January 2020): 5657. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145657.
[3] Capeluto, I Guedi, Abraham Yezioro, Tamar Bleiberg, and Edna Shaviv. “FROM COMPUTER MODELS TO SIMPLE DESIGN TOOLS: SOLAR RIGHTS IN THE DESIGN OF URBAN STREETS,” 2005.
[4] Natanian, Jonathan, Francesco De Luca, Thomas Wortmann, and Guedi Capeluto. “The Solar Block Generator: An Additive Parametric Method for Solar-Driven Urban Block Design.” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2042, no. 1 (November 1, 2021): 012049. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/2042/1/012049.
[5] De Luca, Francesco. “Solar Form Finding: Subtractive Solar Envelope and Integrated Solar Collection Computational Method for High-Rise Buildings in Urban Environments.” In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MA): CUMINCAD, 2017. http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/paper/acadia17_212.
[6] Brembilla, Eleonora, Shervin Azadi, and Pirouz Nourian. “A Computational Approach for Checking Compliance with European View and Sunlight Exposure Criteria.” In Proceedings of Building Simulation Conference 2021. Bruges, Belgium, 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.11037.
[7] Kunihiko Fujiwara, Ryuta Tsurumi, Tomoki Kiyono, Zicheng Fan, Xiucheng Liang, Binyu Lei, Winston Yap, Koichi Ito, Filip Biljecki, VoxCity: A seamless framework for open geospatial data integration, grid-based semantic 3D city model generation, and urban environment simulation, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Volume 123, 2026,
102366, ISSN 0198-9715, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2025.102366.
[8] Snigdha Dev Roy, Monika Kuffer, Jiong Wang, Exploring the influence of building morphology on surface temperatures: A multi-city analysis in Europe, Building and Environment,
Volume 282, 2025, 113274, ISSN 0360-1323, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113274.
The topic can be tailored as much as desired to the specific data/regulatory challenges of a particular local government or a nation-state for ensuring equitable management of the utilization of energy potentials. The integration of such smart regulations in participatory planning and urban design processes is a wicked problem that needs to be framed and tackled iteratively.