Municipalities of all sizes are planning for emissions reductions across their jurisdictions. Understanding the interactions of urban form and energy across different patterns of development is critically important.

This project developed an approach for simulating built environment energy demand using urban form archetypes broadly representative of the types of urban form present in most BC municipalities.

Our energy demand simulation approach adapted the existing Urban Modeling Interface developed at MIT. It uses a bottom-up approach, simulating energy demand for each individual building, as well as the interactions between buildings. This approach simulates not only current conditions, but possible future scenarios under different urban form, technological, or behavioural conditions.

An additional component of this research focused on converting the urban form archetypes into procedural rules using Esri’s CityEngine. This approach makes the archetypes dynamic, allowing modification if road widths, land use, parcel sizes, zoning bylaws, etc. to more closely approximate local conditions in different municipalities within BC, and beyond.

Future research that builds from this project will incorporate building energy demand metrics directly into the procedural rules, so that urban form and metrics of performance can both be generated dynamically.