Global comparative study of cities through CHOAMS, a nonlinear urban design framework that can support better urban investment schemes while avoiding urban fragmentation.

Abstract

At SASBE 2024, we presented a nonlinear framework to study urban environments and help practitioners reliably generate synergistic value through their urban design projects. Our work was based on a model trained for Wellington, NZ, using a dataset of ca. 200,000 data points. Here we expand our study to compare 10 cities in New Zealand, Europe, and the U.S.A. with models trained on a dataset of several million entries. This comparative research demonstrates general rules that hold across continents, as well as idiosyncrasies in the functioning of urban environments. For example, urban diversity and access to a diverse supply of urban activities typically create added value. At the same time, different cities have different modes of life, which can be quite unique, reflecting different synergies and antagonism between activities in each city. Studying mobility, we find that different mobility options are mostly beneficial, facilitating different types of access to a diverse supply of activities, which mostly creates value, although the exact parameters differ from city to city, in this case as well. These insights help architects and planners conceptualize cities and, with modeling support, make decisions for future urban designs.