Publications related to Urban density

Spatial Modeling for Building Design Evaluation: from Visual Landscape Quality Assessment to Devaluation Risk Estimation

Zoning reform is a crucial tool for cities to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, its implementation remains challenging. Property owners, with a vested interest in the value of their neighborhoods, are sensitive to local developments and the potent ...

EPFL2024

Visual Capital: Evaluating building-level visual landscape quality at scale

Adam Robert Swietek

Evaluating visual landscape quality provides valuable information for urban development and spatial planning. In practice however, obtaining high resolution view-metrics and outcome data with sufficient geographic coverage has remained challenging. To over ...

2023

The Future of Civic Technologies for the Involvement of Citizens in Urban Planning: 3D Urban Participatory e-Planning in the Spotlight

Thibaud Nicolas Chassin

The development of sustainable urban projects is crucial to address the challenges of the growing population living in cities. Facing complex decision-making and increasing expectations from inhabitants, local institutions are gradually becoming open to co ...

EPFL2022

Spatial analysis of the Healthy Built Environment: an application on Cardiovascular Risk Factors in the canton of Geneva

Andrea Salmi

Most of the world population lives in urban areas, the share of the urban population is estimated to increase in the future decades. The complexity of different land uses and services in urban areas, which composes the built environment, influences human h ...

EPFL2022

Climate resilient interconnected infrastructure: Co-optimization of energy systems and urban morphology

Kavan Javanroodi, Amarasinghage Tharindu Dasun Perera, Vahid Moussavi Nik

Co-optimization of urban morphology and distributed energy systems is key to curb energy consumption and optimally exploit renewable energy in cities. Currently available optimization techniques focus on either buildings or energy systems, mostly neglectin ...

2021

Planning Multi-Scale District Energy Systems with Hybrid Cooling Technologies and Decentralized Thermal Networks for Low Carbon Cities in the Tropics

Shanshan Hsieh

Energy demand for cooling of buildings is projected to drastically increase in the next decades. Urban areas in tropical Asia are expected to contribute a major share to this growing demand. These areas are characterized by a high urban density and a diver ...

EPFL2021

Renewable Land: Planning the Evolution of Logistic Areas

Gloria Serra Coch

Land is the support of life and the generator of energy cycles in the planet, also being a finite resource. The first consequence of urban population growth and build environment expansion is land consumption. Present strategies reduce this expenditure, ge ...

UNIV POLITECNICA CATALUNYA2021

More from Less? Environmental Rebound Effects of City Size

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda

Global sustainability relies on our capacity of understanding and guiding urban systems and their metabolism adequately. It has been proposed that bigger and denser cities are more resource-efficient than smaller ones because they tend to demand less infra ...

2021

Street grids for efficient district cooling systems in high-density cities

Shanshan Hsieh, Arno Schlueter

The feasibility of district cooling systems is linked to their efficiency, which is associated with their capital and operational costs. For reasons of ownership and maintenance, the piping network commonly follows the city's street layout. This paper exam ...

ELSEVIER2020

Linking trajectory data collected with a swarm of drones to the underlying urban network for macroscopic traffic parameter estimation

Nikolaos Geroliminis, Emmanouil Barmpounakis

Recently, an open-data initiative was announced with one of the most complete datasets to study urban congestion. The pNEUMA dataset consists of more than half a million trajectories in heterogeneous traffic. In order to utilize the dataset for macroscopic ...

2020

Towards sustainable transitions of peri-urban neighborhoods of detached houses

Judith Elisa Drouilles, Emmanuel Rey

Peri-urban neighborhoods of detached houses are facing countless challenges related to the building stock’s low energy efficiency, to the current demographic transition reducing household size and increasing the proportion of elderlies, to their distant lo ...

2020

On the relation between transversal and longitudinal scaling in cities

João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda

Does the scaling relationship between population sizes of cities with urban metrics like economic output and infrastructure (transversal scaling) mirror the evolution of individual cities in time (longitudinal scaling)? The answer to this question has impo ...

2020

Lieu hologrammatique, un concept et une méthodologie complexe de mesure de l'organisation spatiale des réalités sociales

Thibault Pierre Louis Romany

The urban is a complex phenomenon whose exploration remains a important scientific challenge. Choosing complex thought in order to renew our capacities for understanding and action on and with the urban is not trivial. The complex thought developed by Edga ...

EPFL2020

Intermediate Cities

Jean-Claude Bolay, Abigaïl-Laure Sarah Irène Kern

Cities are defined mainly based on spatial and demographic criteria. The criteria of intermediation helps in identifying current urban dynamics, in relation to surrounding suburban/rural areas or in national and international environments. Medium‐sized cit ...

Wiley2019

De ville moyenne à ville intermédiaire : les dynamiques de Jacmel et son positionnement en Haïti

Abigaïl-Laure Sarah Irène Kern

Even though the world’s population is nowadays essentially urban, the mediumsized cities have historically been disregarded by public policies and research due to numerous difficulties defining these “in-between towns”. This lack of definition is even more ...

2019

Protostructure, archéologie et hypothèse d'une architecture-support

Agathe Claire Estelle Mignon

« How do we pile up dwellings without sacrificing their independence ? » Nicolas John Habraken asks the question in those terms in the book he first published in Dutch in 1961 then in English in 1972, Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, as an introd ...

EPFL2019

The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use

Franziska Meinherz, João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda, Aristide Henri Roger Athanassiadis

Hosting more than half of the world population, cities are currently responsible for two thirds of the global energy use and three quarters of the global CO2 emissions related to energy use. As humanity becomes more urbanized, urban systems are becoming a ...

2019

Socio-economic determinants of sprawl: causes and consequences of urban growth in Swiss municipalities

Barbara Franziska Weilenmann

In Switzerland, as elsewhere, over the past decades, urban areas have spread outwards â consuming the surrounding countryside in the process. The result has been an urban growth associated with negative effects such as the loss of cultivated land. Sprawl ...

EPFL2019

A solar-based sustainable urban design: The effects of city-scale street-canyon geometry on solar access in Geneva, Switzerland

Jean-Louis Scartezzini, Dan Assouline, Jérôme Henri Kämpf, Nahid Mohajeri Pour Rayeni

Buildings commonly have the largest share in the energy demand of a country, but they also offer sites for the generation of solar energy. Here we develop a methodology to analyse the effects of street-canyon geometries on the solar access of street surfac ...

2019

Historical dynamics of ecosystem services and land management policies in Switzerland

Jérôme Chenal, Martí Bosch Padrós, Stéphanie Aline Hasler, Rémi Jaligot

Ecosystem services (ES) are dynamic over space and time. Understanding and quantifying spatio-temporal trade-offs and synergies among multiples ES, as well identifying the drivers of change provides an opportunity to make the link between ecosystems, polic ...

2019