elementslab researchers are leading the community stream of the ‘Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment’ (EEBE) project, funded by Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. The EEBE project researches policy, finance, community and building solutions to reduce GHGs in BC’s built environment. The ‘Community Solutions’ subproject focuses on evaluating energy and emissions reduction strategies against different patterns of urban form. To conduct this work, we developed representative urban form archetypes from a spatial analysis of BC communities and apply them to representative areas of six cities in BC.

This research combines econometric future models developed by the EMRG Lab (of contemplated policy, form and behavior variables) with future spatial urban form models. This approach uses “measured visualizations” of archetypal patterns of urban form across “what-if” scenarios for different urban environments representative of the diverse cities and municipalities of British Columbia, Canada. To do this, we developed a spatial simulation approach that allows us to model energy demand, GHG emissions, and select livability indicators for different urban form strategies. The results quantitatively and visually simulate spatially explicit scenarios, exploring interactions and co-benefits among livability and climate mitigation variables.