REFINEMENTS REQUIRED AT THE ARCHITECTURAL SCALE While the test cases highlighted a lack of resolution achieved by the algorithm at the architectural and street-scape level, they did suggest exciting new possibilities for a finer level of development. In Part II, Environmental parameters, agricultural requirements and urban programs provide more detailed inputs for further resolution at this scale. The units produced by the Settlement Simulation are considered to be diagrammatic. In place of these volumes, the many varieties of urban surfaces should be considered for their potential for production. Sectional variation will be employed to exploit this potential. THE LIMITATIONS OF USING POPULATION DENSITY Using population density has historically proven an unreliable metric in analysing urban form. Household size varies greatly with economic conditions and changes in demographics of an area. As Berghauser Pont and Haupt showed in their book Space Matrix, areas of Amsterdam have experienced extreme fluctuations in population density within the same built environment over the last 400 years. For our purposes, agricultural production must be tied to number of people and not FAR or GSI or other more formally consistent density evaluation tools. Therefore our experiments have been run with household sizes typical of Brooklyn, NY and similar cities of the US and Western Europe. However, the model has the ability to be re-scaled for different household sizes for application to various communities.
REGIONAL SCALE Working at the regional scale will allow us to address crops not incorporated in the neighbourhood model. We propose that the regional model might be implemented by working at a lower resolution, incorporating these additional production types as well as natural preserves and recreation areas and topographical features. The calculations made at this lower resolution would provide the inputs (Density, Friendliness, etc..) for the neighbourhood-scale simulations, much like climate models which use a variable scale grid. DISTRIBUTED VS COMPACT CITIES Contemporary theories of urban growth hold that compactness, density and vertical growth are the route to lowering the ecological footprint of cities. Studies of transportation usage in cities of increasing densities seem to support this, citing lower fossil fuel consumption in hyper-compact Asian metropolises44.
44. UNEP, 2008. p138
This argument however, fails to acknowledge the agricultural footprint of city dwellers. Once productive lands, grazing areas, and related fossil fuels use is factored in, it becomes clear that compacting our living spaces is a small part of the work needed to be done to alleviate the pressure humans put on our planet. Our work suggests that there is a limit to the effectiveness of vertical growth and density alone, and that approaches to urbanism must consider the city's inputs and outputs and metabolic processes as a whole.
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