The workshop on parametric urban planning  with Space Syntax and DeCodingSpaces-toolbox for Grasshopper is hosted by:

The 12th International Space Syntax Symposium (12SSS) will be held in Beijing from 8th to 13th July 2019, at Beijing Jiaotong University


 

Lecturers:

Reinhard König                   Bauhaus University, Weimar
Martin Bielik                       Bauhaus University, Weimar
Yufan Miao                          ETH Zurich, FCL Singapore

Short summary:

During this one-day-workshop you will be introduced to methods for the analysis, generation and optimizations of urban layouts with DeCodingSpaces-Toolbox for Grasshopper. We will use existing urban context to analyze the impact of the street network configuration on different types of human behavior such as movement, walkability or land use distribution. Than we will learn how to use the analysis results to generate new street network layouts, parcels and buildings parametrically. Finally, we will demonstrate how to you evolutionary optimization to improve the performance of the parametric design toward pre-defined planning goals.

For this purpose we use Grasshopper for Rhino3D with the plugin DecodingSpaces-Toolbox. The methods are demonstrated by realistic case studies in an existing urban environments.

This workshop is intended for both practitioners and researchers interested in rapid context aware generation of urban layouts. The presented workflow let you computationally explore the design options of new urban development area with the potential to assess the site potential and inform the early planning stages.

Workshop schedule

8:30 – 9:00 Registration
9:00 – 12:25 Analysis | Street network analysis with DeCodingSpaces Toolbox

Shortest paths – Metric, Angular, Custom
Multi modal travel
Centrality measures
Weighting origins and destinations of movement
12:25 – 13:30 Lunch break
13:30 – 15:00 Generation | Parametric urban form synthesis

Street network synthesis
Street block recognition
Parametric parcelation
Parametric building generation
15:00 – 15:30 break
15:30 – 17:00

Optimization | Evolutionary optimization of street network configuration

Evolutionary optimization basics
Street network as custom chromosome
Application examples

Install instructions

Unblocking plugins

After downloading the RequiredGHPlugins_SimAUD19.zip file, check if its unblocked before extracting the zip archive. Right click on the file > Properties > select unblock > select ok

Install components

After unlocking and extracting the RequiredGHPlugins_SimAUD19.zip archive, copy the “SimAUD19 components” folder into the grasshopper component folder. The grasshopper component folder can be found at:

 C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Grasshopper\Libraries

or via grasshopper file menu:

Install user objects

After unlocking and extracting the RequiredGHPlugins_SimAUD19.zip archive, copy the “SimAUD19 user objects” folder into the grasshopper UserObjects folder. The grasshopper component folder can be found at:

 C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Grasshopper\UserObjects

or via grasshopper file menu:

Enable GPU acceleration

The requirement to run the GPU accelerated street network analysis is the CUDA platform enabled NVIDIA GPU.
If this requirement is fulfilled, you have to copy the folders “Alea.CUDA.CT.LibDevice” and “Alea.CUDA.CT.Native.X86.B64.Windows” from the GPU acceleration folder to your Rhino install folder (i.e. “Program Files\Rhinoceros 6 (64-bit)\System\”).

Part 1 – Street Network Analysis

Presentation

Documentation

Interactive documentation of the Street Network Analysis toolbox.

Hands on example files:

Street Network Editing Utilities

01| CITY GRAPH STARTING EXAMPLE

Basic setup for different options how to use the street network analysis tools to calculate shortest paths and centrality measures.


Download Grasshopper file

04| CITY GRAPH ONE WAY ROADS

The underlying spatial graph is directed one, which means that to every street we can assign different distance weight in each direction. In the example we demonstrate how this can be used to model traffic regulation such as one way streets.


Download Grasshopper file

02| PARK EDGE WEIGHTING

Calculating shortest paths by assigning custom distance weights (graph edges) to the spatial network. The edge weights can be metric, angular, custom or any combination of these. Thus we can represent different concepts of distance (e.g. time, safety, cognitive distance)


Download Grasshopper file

05| CITY GRAPH CENTRALITY VERTEX WEIGHTING

When calculation street network centrality, we can assign custom weight to each graph vertex (origin and destination of shortest path). This can be used to model network in which some nodes (e.g. train station) produce more movement than others.


Download Grasshopper file

03| CITY GRAPH BUS EDGE WEIGHTING

The application of custom distance weights (edge weights) is demonstrated on the example of multi-modal transportation network. Street segment which serve as bus routes are given shorter distance representing travel time compared to pedestrian street segments.


Download Grasshopper file
Download Rhino file

06| CITY GRAPH CENTRALITY DISTANCE DECAY

In several centrality measures (e.g. gravity), the attractiveness of destination is  inversely proportional to function of distance. As distance grows, the attractiveness is getting lower. In the street network analysis toolbox, this distance decay function can be defined by user representing different types of behavior and aversion to travel.


Download Grasshopper file

Street Network Editing Utilities

01| NETWORK EDITING TOOLS

To gain correct and speedy analysis results of any street network, this has to be usually simplified and corrected for drawing errors. DeCodingSpaces toolbox offers range of tools to split lines, remove duplicates, simplify intersections and remove dead ends.


Download Grasshopper file

02| CUSTOM OFFSET

Transforms the street network into closed polylines – street blocks which can be offseted by custom value for each block edge. We demonstrate this functionality by offseting the block edges by their respective street network centrality values.


Download Grasshopper file

Part 2 – Generation of Street network, Plots and Buildings

Street Network Optimization

01| STREET NETWORK GENERATION

Generate Street Networks in a given area with initial street segments by controlling parameters for street segment length, angle between streets and connectivity.


Download Grasshopper file

02| BUILDING PLOTS GENERATION

Based on the generated Street Network we extract the Street Blocks and generate Plots based on control parameters like the maximal area, minimal width of the street side, etc.


Download Grasshopper file

03| BUILDING GENERATION

For each plot we generate buildings of various typologies controlling the parameters for setbacks, building sizes, orientation and density.


Download Grasshopper file

Part 3 – Street Network Optimization

Hands on example files:

Street Network Optimization

01| Chromosome Demonstration

In this example file, we demonstrate how the generative methods are represented using a specific data structure to be used for evolutionary optimization in the next step.


Download Grasshopper file

02| Evolutionary Multi-Criteria Optimization

Based on the generative components and a particular data structure, we can use a multi-criteria evolutionary optimization algorithm to search for good urban design variants.


Download Grasshopper file

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