Procedural modeling of urban green space pattern designs taking into account ecological parameters

Cities all over the world are challenged by increasing the quality of life of urban citizens in order to ensure sustainable urban development. However, a lot of policies and planning fail in integrating environmental aspects in a way that makes them applicable for design leading to rather unsustainable developments. This paper presents an approach to integrate ecological parameters into urban design using a procedural, shape grammar driven modeling and visualization system. Design specifications and ecological goals given in the Masterplan of MASDAR City derived as an application example for the workflow. We used the concept of ecosystem services to break down the ecological process knowledge to design rules and meaningful, quantifiable spatial indicators. Our results demonstrate the application of the proposed approach covering different planning scales (district and building level). The integrated model suits as an assessment tool that can be used to test urban design alternatives on the ecological functioning as a starting point for architects.