A 15-minute city. A community susceptible to natural disasters yet isn’t continuously destroyed by them. An abundance of reliable public transport options. An urban landscape covered with greenery, with traffic patterns hidden underground or otherwise out of sight. Infrastructure powered by green energy and backed by data and machine learning.
If it were possible to build the perfect city, the list of components urban planners need to consider would include those and many more. There’s a lot that goes into designing the ideal urban area. And while in most places it’s practically impossible to break ground and start over from scratch, it’s always possible to do so digitally. Using virtual twins, it’s likely to conduct city planning in a controlled environment, combining all of a metropolis’s urban systems into a single 3D model, designing unbeatable infrastructure and crafting a smart city bound for success.
Designing an ideal urban environment: Weather edition
If you’ve ever spent time in a city, chances are you’ve noticed some of its problems. New York City in the summer is nice, but the trash heaps that dot every street corner and coat neighborhoods with a foul stench make it less enticing to visit in the warmer months. Los Angeles is beautiful, but its endless traffic and limited public transportation make it hard to navigate. Venice’s daily floods, the damage to Paris’ railways from nearly routine heatwaves—the list goes on.
Every major and minor metropolitan area has unique challenges, some based on physical location, others on decades of policy decisions at the hands of city officials, others a factor of rapid growth with infrastructure that can’t withstand population swells. These complications provide valuable insights for planning what could be a perfect city. For city planners, understanding the limitations of the natural environment in which an urban area is located can be empowering. Just look at Babcock Ranch, Florida.
Babcock Ranch is a planned community in southwest Florida, an area routinely impacted by devastating hurricanes characterized by mind-blowing winds and torrential downpours that cause massive floods. To combat the effects of these natural disasters, Babcock Ranch’s planners took an innovative approach. The city’s urban development – its homes, commercial district, schools and more – was constructed to isolate them from the wetlands that flood in bad weather. By observing flood patterns, the planners also developed a system to mitigate overflow by creating artificial lakes with subterranean pipes that allow water to be distributed equally across these man-made ponds. Elevating roadways and diverting rainwater to absorbent wetlands have also made this city “hurricane-proof.”
Babcock Ranch isn’t unique as planned communities go – there are plenty more across the globe. However, the attention the town’s planners paid highlights something often missing in urban design. The weather isn’t something we can easily manipulate; we can only deal with its consequences. It makes perfect sense that planning an ideal city would require considering how to mitigate the impact of nasty storms, especially as they become more frequent and deadly.
Like Babcock Ranch, a city in Japan also had a flooding problem. Keihanna, a neighborhood in Kyoto, is susceptible to damage from the rain brought in by tsunamis. To design a solution to combat the floods, Keihanna’s leaders turned to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to build a virtual twin that could model and simulate various situations. By using a virtual model, they were able to glean insights that might previously have been missed. The virtual replica they conceived allowed the city’s leaders to visually map how various flood levels would impact particular buildings, based on their height, identifying the most vulnerable edifices in the riverside neighborhood. The end goal was to design data-driven evacuation plans that would be sent directly to residents’ smartphones, adding a layer of citizen engagement to a well-established plan.
The impact of ideal infrastructure
Planning a city around natural disasters that are likely to hit it represents a fantastic way to approach urban planning. Including well-conceived resilient infrastructure plans in that process only takes the design a step further, toward being a sustainable, smart city.
Some components of resilient urban infrastructure also concern weather and the impact it can have on systems like public transportation, energy grids and communications lines. However, for a city to be resilient and innovative, those systems require a little bit more. Stoplights outfitted with cameras and artificial intelligence can serve as a mechanism to aid traffic patterns and help them flow more smoothly. Railway systems with IoT sensors and AI can enable predictive maintenance, preventing or reducing the frequency of service stoppages. Adding a layer of technology enables relevant parties to spot weaknesses and a virtual twin of these infrastructure pieces provides a platform for diagnosing problems and implementing solutions at scale.
The challenges of (im)perfect planning
Despite the premise of planned cities being a controlled experiment with only success as a possible outcome, the track record of intentional communities isn’t spotless. Even when starting from scratch, there are obstacles that can be tricky to avoid. While some planned cities have broken ground and built livable, thriving urban areas, others have faltered. In Indonesia, plans to erect a new capital city have been marred by a variety of problems; the same can be said for Saudi Arabia’s NEOM. Funding, outsize expectations, structural difficulties, natural disasters: all these and more can bring construction crews to a halt.
What insights can be gleaned from these failures?
In an ideal world, large-scale plans for urban development and infrastructure would be mapped out virtually. Dozens of tests would be carried out, considering every possible scenario, to uncover hidden weaknesses. But in the real world, even the most well-laid plans are vulnerable. The advantage of using virtual twins to conduct city planning operations is that planners are able to develop not just original blueprints and layouts, but contingency plans, too. Imagine if the city you live in was hit by a natural disaster while a major roadway was under construction, and the impact of the storm took public transportation networks offline and unusable. By simulating situations like these in a virtual model and contained environment, city officials are able to develop the best potential solutions for conditions that will hopefully never occur.
Planning future-proof, perfect cities
While building the perfect city is functionally impossible to do in most places, planning one isn’t. By creating mockups in a virtual environment, it becomes drastically easier to pinpoint potential areas for improvement. Letting go of traditional models and methods – like the planners responsible for Babcock Ranch did – empowers leaders to make better decisions. A virtual replica of a street, neighborhood or entire city also lends itself well to decision-making processes that rely on large amounts of data. Urban management requires accuracy that’s made much, much easier through the integration of technology. Sustainable, smart cities that are powered by resilient infrastructure and work with – not against – their natural environments will perhaps one day be so commonplace they won’t be noteworthy. Using applications like virtual twins and artificial intelligence can help urban planners around the world get there.
Shoshana is a Senior Communications Manager on the Corporate Publishing team here at Dassault Systèmes. With experience in journalism, marketing, and PR, her work has been published around the world and across the internet.