New Neighborhood Development
The problem
The global building stock is expected to double by 2050. While most of this growth is expected to happen in India, Africa and other emerging economies, ongoing population growth necessitates new construction across the globe as shown in the image below by Weber et al. To promote sustainable sustainable practices, urban design teams need reliable analysis methods that simultaneously consider multiple performance criteria from operational and embodied building energy use to neighborhood walkability, access to daylight and locally grown food.
The solution
UBEM.IO can be used to quickly prepare a urban model of an existing urban setting to which a new neighborhood development will be added. The resulting file can be downloaded and used to conduct a multidimensional urban analysis for the new neighborhood using MIT’s Urban modeling Interface (UMI).
The UMI model consists of existing buildings, streets and parks as well as construction templates for new buildings. Depending on project scope, existing buildings can be treated as shading objects or fully included the energy, daylighting and site analysis. Note that in contrast to the existing neighborhood use case, this analysis can be completed by an energy modeler with no or minimal background in GIS. A description of the overall modeling workflow is provided below
To learn how to develop an urban model of a new neighborhood go to the New Construction workflow overview .