Application of the planning support system URBio

The planning support system URBio is demonstrated via two case studies. Both case studies are located in the canton of Geneva. The first case study is a greenfield planning project, where the goal is to build a new district on former agricultural land. The project responds to the urgent, global challenges of urbanization, and climate change by developing a relatively dense, ecofriendly district. The second case study focuses on a brownfield planning project, that is, the redevelopment of an existing neighborhood. Consequently, the planning support system was adapted to address the challenges and measures specific to urban redevelopment. Through both case studies, the reader will be walked through a typical application process of URBio, illustrating how it is used interactively to explore and narrow the search space, how new questions might come up during this process, and how URBio enables to find further answers. The first case study will illustrate with practical examples the trade-offs between common planning targets such as energy, density, and social aspects (e.g., share of parks). The second case study provides a more in-depth analysis of the current state of the energy system, the limits in achievable densities, and emission saving potentials by replacement of conversion systems and thermal building refurbishments

Building Inventory and Refurbishment Scenario Database Development for Switzerland

© 2017, Yale University. Material usage and the related embodied environmental impact have grown in significance in the built environment. Therefore, cities and governments need to develop strategies to reduce both the consumption of resources during usage phase as well as the embodied impact of the current building stock. This article proposes a new component-based building inventory database as a basis to develop such strategies using building stock modeling. The developed database clusters the building stock according to building typology (single-family houses, multifamily houses, and office buildings), age, and the main construction systems of the different building components. Based on the component makeup, it lists the necessary material input and waste output for different refurbishment options for each building component. The advantages of the proposed database structure are shown based on two applications for the developed database for Switzerland. The component-based database allows optimization of refurbishment strategies not only from an energetic perspective, but also with respect to materials, both on the input (sourcing of materials) and the output (waste streams) level. The database structure makes it possible to continuously extend the data set by adding new refurbishment options or add data such as component-specific lifetimes, costs, or labor intensities of the refurbishment options. In combination with an aligned economic model, this would give an even more holistic view, impact, and feasibility of different refurbishment scenarios both in environmental and economic terms