Urban Form and GHG Emissions

Urban Form and Greenhouse Gas Emissions,A+BE | Architecture and the Built Environment, October 20, 2015 by Michael Mehaffy. amazon

This issue of A+BE assesses the factors of urban morphology that contribute to increased rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita, and the ways they interact. It finds a significant but underrepresented set of factors, distinct from but relating the factors at the individual building scale and the scale of regional transportation systems.

The investigation assesses the methodologies by which such findings might be put to use in identifying and achieving reductions through changes in urban design, and proposes new strategies to do so using innovative forms of design decision support tools.

The author proposes a specific new technology, namely a new class of open-source scenario-modelling tool, embodied in new prototype software.

The tool utilizes a new kind of “federated” web-based wiki technology incorporating design pattern languages, which was developed in collaboration with the software engineer and wiki inventor Ward Cunningham.

Hacking Wiki's Methods was motivated by this work.