Efficiency of planning and design tools towards eco-friendly high-density community

Abstract

High-density development in a city or community has been increasingly promoted in urban planning arena to achieve sustainable, ecological goals through impact on transportation behaviour and less per capita land consumption. Such high-density development to achieve region-wide ecological purpose, however, may have a negative ecological impact at the community level in terms of worsened natural light, wind, and the space needed for humans, animals, and vegetation to live healthily, and in turn affects the acceptance of high-density policy. One of the solutions to mitigating the negative impact may lie in the spatial arrangement of building mass and outdoor space since they determines the fundamental spatial characteristics in the community; however, few studies have been carried out in this area. This paper aims to present an inventory of urban planning and design tools for arranging building mass and open space, and to examine their impacts on some eco-friendly indexes. A real case of urban renewal site is applied for simulation analysis to assess the impacts of the planning tools, while in order to evaluate the general impact of each planning tool a hypothetical city is developed, where other factors can be controlled for. The results suggest that lowering the building coverage rate and increasing height-distance ratio are the two most efficient tools for improving the overall quality of eco-cities for the selected indexes. The efficiency of the tools in improving individual aspects of an eco-city, such as pedestrian-friendly environment, green space accessibility, adaptive capacity of CO2 absorption, and animal biodiversity are also gauged. These research findings can help improve the eco-city planning or design guidelines, which may work more effectively citywide in developing eco-city than the more labor-intensive case-based simulation review process, popular in many cities. © 2015 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.