Towards a modular design strategy for urban masterplanning - Experiences from a parametric urban design studio on emerging cities in Ethiopia

In emerging countries there is a need for rapid urban planning, since they are confronted by unprecedented wave of urbanization. This need is even bigger since usually there is no adequate number of professional educated urban planners in these countries. Therefore, we investigate in this paper how to develop a set of methods that allow to generate urban fabric semi-automatically. The challenge is to come up with a generative planning model that adapts to multiple boundary conditions.Through a modular design strategy generative methods are applied by students in an urban design studio in order to combine them into more complex planning strategies for small cities in the emerging country of Ethiopia. The modular approach allows to break down planning into sub-issues to better deal with the overarching problem. For testing the implemented generative urban design strategies various cities are generated at different locations in Ethiopia with various topographic situations. Their underlying design strategies and modular approach are discussed in this paper.