Intelligent Urban Planning And Computational Architecture

Reinhard is Professor for Computational Architecture at Bauhaus-University Weimar and Principal Scientist at the Center for Energy at the Smart and Resilient Cities competence unit at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Vienna. In addition, he acts as Co-PI in the Big Data Informed Urban Design group at the Future Cities Lab (FCL) at the Singapore ETH Centre. His current research interests are applicability of multi-criteria optimization techniques for planning synthesis, cognitive design computing and correlations of computed measures of spatial configurations with human cognition and usage of space.

- Sharmila Chakravorty

In the past, when architects and planners were faced with issues such a large-scale, affordable housing, or developing new cities, the approach was to look for prototypical solutions that were very industrial in nature. These solutions were usually reproduced several times, in several places, without any customization or consideration for context or other parameters. As a result, the output was not qualitatively great for several reasons.

How you approach a problem is what matter

Every site has certain strengths that architects use to their advantage while designing projects. However, in large-scale affordable housing schemes, for instance, the focus is on providing shelters to a large number of inhabitants, without much attention to the site’s strengths. As a result, the built structures might not make the best use of available light, space, ventilation, etc. Similarly, in the case of city planning, the design might not have taken into consideration issues like traffic decongestion and circulation. Further, these solutions also disregard beauty, as they focus heavily on functionality. We have seen several such failures in the past. While the solution benefited people in the sense that it provided a place to stay, or a city to locate them in, it did not add to their lives qualitatively. They were not socially inclusive, and let to several problems in terms of crime too. Eventually, many of these buildings were demolished, and many cities were deemed dangerous and unlivable.

New-age solution for age-old problems