Urban Design Assessment Using Modern Technology

Abstract

Throughout the past century communities have been constantly evolving. From the basic design concepts of the Wild West, limited facilities or buildings centralized for easy access, all the way to the Urban sprawl that we are currently trying remedy, due to increased cost of resources and land development. New Urbanism was a concept that rose in the early 1980's that specifically targeted the idea of being able to access multiple facilities and needs by simply walking, instead of organizing and designing cities based off of the automobile. Without even thinking about it the main objective of New Urbanism was to minimize the use of natural resources and the depletion of usable space. By incorporating basic design ideals of New Urbanism, such as smart growth, environmentalism, and regionalism we would be able to take efficient city and community development to the stage of city evolution if we would include passive design principles. The idea of walkable cities was to create an environment that did not revolve around the automobile, which in fact leads to the idea of sustainable design in a very simple sense. By collecting data and research we can correlate smart design with sustainable principles. By utilizing state of the art software and technology we can create a one to one correlative study that can pinpoint the effects that wind studies, solar gains, passive orientation, internal cooling strategies and other passive concepts actually have on an environmental system the size of a community instead of just looking at spaces and buildings as individual pieces, but now investigate the community as a whole.