Abstract
We develop a novel statistical decision-theoretic framework for urban design from an outdoor thermal comfort (OTC), social and economic perspectives. We combine those aspects into spatio-temporal risk measures which provide a compact representation of the overall quality of an urban design scenarios (UDS) set. We then formulate the selection of the optimal design as an optimization problem which is easy to solve and has a clear interpretation. To illustrate how our framework can be used in practice, we present a real-world study, which is based on a set of UDS that aim to improve the OTC of a specific site in Singapore. We show how our framework provides decision makers the flexibility to make choices relevant to their design objectives, leading to informed and interpretable design option selection.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Cong Ye, Michelle Chan, Sailin Zhong and Jan Perhac from Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC), Singapore, for their implementation of the design tool in Singapore Views. The research was conducted under the Cooling Singapore project, funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF) (Grant No. NRF2019VSG-UCD-001) under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) and its Virtual Singapore programmes. Cooling Singapore is a collaborative project led by the Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC), with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), TUMCREATE (established by the Technical University of Munich), the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Singapore Management University (SMU), and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
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Nevat, I., Pignatta, G., Ruefenacht, L.A. et al. A decision support tool for climate-informed and socioeconomic urban design. Environ Dev Sustain 23, 7627–7651 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00937-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00937-1