Empowering urban design prototyping: a case study in Cape Town with interactive computational synthesis methods

Although Cape Town city in South Africa is generally regarded as the most stable and prosperous city in the region, there are still approximately 7.5 million people living in informal settlements and about 2.5 million housing units are needed (reference to website excluded for review). This motivates the so-called Empower Shack project, aiming to develop upgrading strategies for these informal settlements. To facilitate the fulfilment of this project, urban design prototyping tools are researched and developed with the capabilities for fast urban design synthesis. Therefore, with this paper we present a computational method for fast interactive synthesis of urban planning prototypes. For the generation of mock-up urban layouts, one hierarchical slicing structure, namely, the slicing tree is introduced as an abstract representation of the parcels as an extension of the existing generative method for street network. It has been proved that our methods can interactively assist the urban planning process in practice. However, the newly introduced data structure has several limitations and hinders the further improvement of urban synthesis. In the future, the development of a new data structure is required to fulfil the optimization methods for urban synthesis and evaluation strategies should be enabled to fully realize the computational support.