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Sustainable Design: Digital Technology as an Enabler to City Planning
Professor Jason Pomeroy is an architect, academic, author and TV presenter and regarded as one of the world’s leaders in sustainable design. He is the founder of interdisciplinary sustainable design and research firm, Pomeroy Studio, and sustainable education provider, Pomeroy Academy. He is also a fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and a happy father of two who attend The Perse School Singapore.
As cities have become smarter, the advent of new technologies in the past century has influenced city planning and design, particularly in the representation of cities. This has manifested in the hand drawings of the (analogue) city to the programmable software products in the (digital) city. It has further enabled different entities in the cities to behave in intelligent and co-ordinated ways. Yet, about half a century ago, hand drawings were still widely recognised as the dominant means for planning, designing and representing cities, buildings and their infrastructure. It was a standard practice to work in “plan layers”. Each layer described a different functional element of a site, such as different land uses, infrastructure and open spaces at city, district and neighbourhood scale. Arduous data collection was made on-site and only updated intermittently. Additionally, the drawings were based on abstractions that only those within the built environment professions understood. Despite the long-standing history of the handdrawn process, computer-aided design (CAD) drafting has been adopted as a replacement for two-dimensional (2D) drawings since the 1980s, and for three-dimensional (3D) isometric drawings over the last two decades. Whilst drawn representations have changed, the nature of information exchange has remained the same. However, the rise of
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s an architect, academic and TV presenter focused on the subject of smart and sustainable cities, I have always been fascinated in the way cities have evolved, how they are represented and understood. The Renaissance established similarities between objects through analogies. For instance, a city to a set of houses and a house to a set of rooms. By the 17th century, relationships were drawn between objects and their hidden meanings of terrestrial life. By the late 18th century, the city was perceived as a utopia born out of social production as well as scientific and philosophical enlightenment. The technologies brought forth by the First Industrial Revolution to the Fourth Industrial Revolution have since reshaped human experiences at an individual level, and the way cities and urban infrastructure can heighten humans’ productivity. 14
