The Changing Role of Optimization in Urban Planning

Most world cities are now planned in one way or another. Through the deliberate positioning of activity and transportation facilities, urban authorities hope to ensure the success of their cities in economic, social and environmental terms. Urban planning models are an important tool to help them in this task, and in this chapter, we examine the use of optimization techniques in urban planning modelling. Through a broad review of the field, we highlight the distinction between single-goal urban-environment models and multi-objective land use and transportation models. While it is shown that optimization no longer plays a stand-alone role in land use and transportation modelling, it does contribute to the overall modelling workflow. Furthermore, optimization forms the basis of two niche applications: excess commuting and sketch modelling. This last field holds the most promise for the future, enabling planners to establish minimum resource consumption benchmarks for their city as a means of comparison with other cities and to evaluate the ambition and feasibility of new plans.

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