Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era

Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era shows how to design, model and monitor smart communities using a distinctive IoT-based urban systems approach. Focusing on the essential dimensions that constitute smart communities energy, transport, urban form, and human comfort, this helpful guide explores how IoT-based sharing platforms can achieve greater community health and well-being based on relationship building, trust, and resilience. Uncovering the achievements of the most recent research on the potential of IoT and big data, this book shows how to identify, structure, measure and monitor multi-dimensional urban sustainability standards and progress.

This thorough book demonstrates how to select a project, which technologies are most cost-effective, and their cost-benefit considerations. The book also illustrates the financial, institutional, policy and technological needs for the successful transition to smart cities, and concludes by discussing both the conventional and innovative regulatory instruments needed for a fast and smooth transition to smart, sustainable communities.

• Provides operational case studies and best practices from cities throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, providing instructive examples of the social, environmental, and economic aspects of “smartification
• Reviews assessment and urban sustainability certification systems such as LEED, BREEAM, and CASBEE, examining how each addresses smart technologies criteria
• Examines existing technologies for efficient energy management, including HEMS, BEMS, energy harvesting, electric vehicles, smart grids, and more

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780128162934

Book preview

Urban Systems Design

Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era

Editors

Yoshiki Yamagata

Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Ibaraki, Japan

Perry P.J. Yang

School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Contributors

Preface

Chapter 1. Urban systems design: shaping smart cities by integrating urban design and systems science

1.1. Cities as flows: emerging new urban forms driven by smart city movement

1.2. Urban design: designing situational, resilient, and transformative urban spaces

1.3. Systems science: understanding urban complexity and big data

1.4. Urban systems design: four possible models

Chapter 2. Urban systems and the role of big data

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Data analytics of urban systems

2.3. IoT as a new smart infrastructure

2.4. Smart objects in urban systems design

2.5. Synthesizing urban design and urban modeling

Chapter 3. Modeling and design of smart buildings

3.1. Defining smart buildings

3.2. Occupancy presence and behaviors in smart buildings

3.3. Approaches of smart buildings

3.4. Conclusion

Chapter 4. Smart buildings of urban communities

4.1. Scaling up from smart buildings to smart community

4.2. Modeling urban buildings

4.3. IoT for modeling and monitoring smart urban buildings

4.4. Conclusion

Chapter 5. Integrating mobility in urban design

5.1. Introduction: urban systems design studios driven by mobility

5.2. Urban design scenarios for the least traffic impacts: Urawa-Misono (2017)

5.3. Mobility for a walkable neighborhood: Sumida Ward and Kyojima (2018 and 2019)

5.4. Conclusion

Chapter 6. Modeling and design of smart mobility systems

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Overview of current transport modeling practice

6.3. Integrated urban design and agent-based mobility simulation

Chapter 7. Spatial modeling and design of smart communities

7.1. Introduction

7.2. Planning support systems for design: integration with building and transport simulations

7.3. System dynamics as an integrated modeling approach

7.4. Integrated simulations at macroscale: land-use transport energy model

7.5. Integrated simulation at microscale: community clustering for energy sharing

Chapter 8. Case studies toward smart communities

8.1. Introduction

8.2. Case studies of smart buildings: Vancouver

8.3. Case studies on smart mobility: Amsterdam and Vienna

8.4. Data-intensive information systems for climate-smart cities

8.5. Urban carbon mapping: Tokyo

Chapter 9. Smart city and ICT infrastructure with vehicle to X applications toward urban decarbonization

9.1. Introduction on smart city

9.2. Blockchain technology for smart community

9.3. FIWARE technology

Chapter 10. IoT-based monitoring for smart community

10.1. Smart community data

10.2. Use cases of smart community data services

10.3. Future smart community data services

Chapter 11. Urban sustainability assessment tools: toward integrating smart city indicators

11.1. Introduction

11.2. Materials and methods

11.3. Results

11.4. Discussions and conclusions

Chapter 12. Measuring quality of walkable urban environment through experiential modeling

12.1. Introduction

12.2. Experiential modeling of urban streets

12.3. Heat wave risk modeling of pedestrians

12.4. Toward smart community: well-being assessment

Chapter 13. Understanding the potentials of green bonds and green certification schemes for the development of future smart cities

13.1. Introduction

13.2. What are green bonds?

13.3. Use of green building certification schemes in the formulations and implementations of green bonds

13.4. Monitoring and reporting the environmental impacts of green bond projects

13.5. Use of green bonds for smart cities

13.6. Conclusion

Chapter 14. Institutional instruments for urban systems design—from the planner's perspective

14.1. Framing urban systems design

14.2. Innovations in zoning and infrastructures

14.3. An experimental area management case of Nishiki 2 District, Nagoya City

14.4. Conclusion

Index

Copyright

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Contributors

Amanda Ahl,     Tokyo Institute of Technology, Minato, Tokyo, Japan

Jelena Aleksejeva,     Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Robert B. Binder,     Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Huiying Cai,     Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

Soowon Chang

Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

School of Building Construction, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Helen Chen,     School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Sylvia Coleman,     Sustainable Built Environment Performance Assessment network, The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Roger Cremades,     Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Hamburg, Germany

Vincent de Gooyert,     Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, HK, The Netherlands

Pieter J. Fourie,     Future Cities Laboratory, ETH, Singapore, Singapore

Leena Ilmola,     International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

Peraphan Jittrapirom,     Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Shun Kawakubo,     Faculty of Engineering and Design, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

Takuro Kobashi

Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan

Tanvi Maheshwari,     Future Cities Laboratory, ETH, Singapore, Singapore

Sergio Ordonez Medina,     Future Cities Laboratory, ETH, Singapore, Singapore

Anastasia Milovidova,     PwC, Tokyo, Japan

Yasunori Mochizuki,     NEC Cooperation, Minato, Tokyo, Japan

Daisuke Murakami,     Department of Data Science, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan

Akito Murayama,     Department of Urban Engineering, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan

Yuichi Nakamura,     Waseda University, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan

Dirk Neumann,     Information Systems Research, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Hiroaki Nishi,     Keio University, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa, Japan

John B. Robinson

Sustainable Built Environment Performance Assessment network, The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, School of the Environment, Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Nirvik Saha,     School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Hajime Seya,     Graduate School of Engineering, Kobe University, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan

Ayyoob Sharifi

Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima Prefecture, Higashi-Hiroshima City, Japan

Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability, Hiroshima Prefecture, Higashi-Hiroshima City, Japan

Paul J. Steidl,     School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Masachika Suzuki,     Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

Michael B. Tobey,     Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Gerasimos Voulgaris,     Faculty of Foreign Studies, Reitaku University, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan

Yoshiki Yamagata,     Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Perry P.J. Yang,     School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Takahiro Yoshida,     Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Mari Yoshitaka

Keio University, Kanagawa, Japan

Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, Tokyo, Japan

Preface

This book introduces urban systems design, an approach that is based on an integration of urban design, system science, and emerging technologies. It explores how sustainable and future smart cities can be created in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. New methods of urban systems design are exemplified in various empirical applications by using urban analytics, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI). It is an attempt to outline a research agenda of smart cities that consists of data capturing and analytics, performance modeling and assessment, and design decisions and implementation. By setting performance goals such as sustainability, resiliency, economy, and human well-being, a comprehensive framework of modeling methods is provided that can be validated and used in practical urban systems design for the making of sustainable and future smart cities.

Part I of the book defines urban systems design as a novel approach by articulating urban design and system science. Intellectual legacy of urban design and the theories of urban complex systems were reviewed, which lead to four possible models of urban systems design as its conceptual framework.

Part II explains the methodological details of the urban systems design approach and their applications to experimental case studies, particularly a series of Tokyo smart city projects run by urban design studios based on an international collaboration of the National Institute for Environmental Studies of Japan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. New ideas of smart urban systems modeling methods are tested through urban design studios. Firstly, the overarching urban systems design framework is elaborated through urban complexity modeling and data analytics tools using big data and AI for improving sustainability of cities (Chapter 2). Modeling and design of smart buildings as an essential element of urban systems and approaches of scaling them up to smart communities are discussed. Potential alternatives of building typologies, urban forms, and how they influence human behavior and properties of urban systems have been explored (Chapters 3 and 4). By the use of massive data, the idea of big data analytics arising from the 2010s was rapidly adopted as a basis for a new scope of agent-based transport modeling. Mobility patterns and their consistency with the underlying network infrastructures are examined (Chapters 5 and 6). The emergence of IoT technologies is also supporting the idea of managing cities as organizational systems. Making cybernetics as the basis for management of near real-time control can be applied as a new concept of urban systems design for smart cities projects (Chapters 7 and 8).

Part III discusses more sustainability-focused case studies to do with urban systems design. Smart cities can function as digital twin interaction empowered by sets of connected subsystems. The archetype urban structure can be designed around land use activities and their economic linkages, and the archetype can be represented by smart mobility movement. The key idea of demand response feedback (Chapter 9) is that the dynamics that holds systems together is represented in terms of a new version of city operations systems which aims to control the pattern of these interactions as an information system in time. New ICT notions (cloud, fog, edge servers) are useful for seeing how elements of urban systems scale up according to their system hierarchies (city, district, community, brock, etc.), which are beneficial in managing how local actions and interactions lead to multiscale patterns (Chapter 10). This new view is about how emergent urban systems patterns can be generated using information that changes the city from the bottom up. We also look at models of cities in buildings and transport, where we illustrate how interactions between key urban systems elements can be assessed from resilience and sustainability perspectives using key performance indicators (Chapter 11). New complexity design can also create agglomeration economies. However, the ultimate goal of this new design is to improve human well-being (Chapter 12).

Part IV discusses issues regarding transition toward smart communities at the implementation phase. None of the urban systems design models could be perfect for operationalizing smart cities in policy contexts. The socioeconomic local dynamics such as financial mechanism needs to be carefully considered when conducting urban systems design (Chapter 13). Institutional instruments behind urban local area planning and management are explained as a key to the success of implementing urban systems design (Chapter 14).

The book is intended for researchers, professionals, and students who are interested in smart cities design, system engineering, and policy using IoT, big data, and AI, in which the new approach urban systems design would prepare them for advancing their works in research, practice, and learning. It is by no means comprehensive, but a sense of breadth and depth of the field is conveyed. We are hoping that the book would stimulate academic and professional communities to build up cross-disciplinary collaborations, which are essential to the making of our future cities as sustainable, resilient, and just places.

Yoshiki Yamagata,     Tsukuba, Japan

Perry P.J. Yang,     Atlanta, United States

September 2019

Chapter 1

Urban systems design

shaping smart cities by integrating urban design and systems science

Perry P.J. Yang ¹ , and Yoshiki Yamagata ²       ¹ School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States      ² Center for global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Abstract

This introductory chapter defines urban systems design as a novel approach to shaping smart cities by integrating urban design, system science, and digital technologies. The question of what new urban form would emerge from the smart cities movement is discussed. Propositions of the space of flow and cities of flows as new spatial logics of organizing cities are reviewed, under the impacts of the information and communication from 1990s to the Internet of Things (IoT) from 2010s. It introduces the intellectual legacy of urban design and system science and elaborates their theories that are facing new challenges of urban technological innovations such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, urban automation, and IoT. This chapter concludes with four possible models of urban systems design: urban sensing systems as a human interactive model, data-driven urban design as a normative model, urban metabolism as a functional model, and Geodesign as a procedure model.

Keywords

Cities as flows; Systems science; Urban design; Urban metabolism; Urban systems design

1.1. Cities as flows: emerging new urban forms driven by smart city movement

1.1.1. Theories for smart cities

Smart cities are becoming a new global movement that uses technologies to drive urban development. Test beds are sprouting up in cities and their strategic areas like Sidewalk Toronto, smart city-nation initiative in Singapore, Energizing Kowloon East in Hong Kong, Pingshan in Shenzhen, and Kashiwanoha in Tokyo. What are potential impacts of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), urban automation, Internet of Things (IoT), pervasive computing, and data science to cities, urban infrastructures, public spaces, and our daily life spaces for live, work, and play? Are there any fundamental changes in organizational principles behind how cities function? What impacts will new technologies create on how humans perceive, design, construct, manipulate, operate, and use cities, urban spaces, and physical environments? What new urban forms would emerge from the smart city movement around the globe?

In 1989, a theory the space of flow was proposed in the book The Informational City by Manuel Castells who argued that information and communication technologies would fundamentally change the concept of urban space, moving away from the space of place to the space of flow (Castells, 1989), a theory appeared a few years before Yahoo and Google started their Internet web browsers. In human civilization, people tend to construct their life in reference to places, by their homes, neighborhoods, towns, and cities. A space of place, or a place-based society, is defined as a locale, in which form, function, and meaning are self-contained within a boundary of territorial contiguity that is grounded on history, culture, and identity. A new mode of spatial organization or a new way of organizing urban form called space of flow was arising due to the impacts of information technologies on cities. The space of flow, a counterproposition to the space of place, is the material arrangements that allow for simultaneously social practices. It is neither a purely electronic space nor a cyberspace. The space of flow is a new form of spatial organization of power and a form of domination, which can escape the control of any locale. As a consequence, the space of place is becoming fragmented, localized, and increasingly powerless (Castells, 1989).

The proposition of the space of flow was insightful in addressing a new logic behind urban changes: a rising network society that avoids historical and cultural linkages and disarticulates the place-based society. As Castells remarked, People live in places, power rules through flows (Castells, 1989, 1996; Fig. 1.1). However, it was not clear how the new logic of the space of flow changes modern urban form. What are new social and technological conditions behind the transformation of contemporary urban spaces and everyday life that operates both physically and digitally? People live in places that are run by flows or capital, energy, resources, and ecology, particularly by the flow of information.

Figure 1.1 Emerging urban skylines of Shanghai Pudong business district (background) and disappearing Linong local neighborhoods as a space of place (foreground), photo taken in 2004 by the first author.

The information and communication technologies also change the way we understand cities. Technologies enable researchers to think of the nondigital aspect of cities digitally, by using computer simulation and modeling, geographic information system (GIS), and building information modeling (BIM) to visualize, model, design, and manage physical urban environment from large-scale urban to small-scale building systems. Cities are now far more designable than ever before due to our capability to digitize, analyze, design, manipulate, and predict the outcomes of building and infrastructural systems, and to a certain extent the urban systems by making changes of them. Of course, social objectives, policy mechanisms, and economic development continue to be the main driving forces behind urban forms and their transformation through design and development.

What is the most profound among all of the changes is perhaps the new form of cities that is embedded with informational and communication technologies, a new digital dimension added to the entire concept of city that goes beyond the Euclidean urban space. The city itself is turning into a constellation of million and million computers. Cities are becoming computable and automated at every level of their operation (Batty, 1997). Personal wearable devices, mobile technologies, sensing systems, IoT, and pervasive computing are defining new form of cities. Digital, computing, and sensing systems constitute a new kind of infrastructure that is changing not only how cities function but also how cities are perceived, understood, interpreted and defined. One of the most inspiring questions is how the city of bits emerges (Mitchell, 1995), what new urban form is to be reorganized, reconfigured, and redesigned to meet new demand of cities and urban spaces in the informational age. Cities are becoming more interactive and situation-driven and have to be more responsive, adaptable, and resilient to future conditions due to unpredictable shocks of climate changes.

When the new information technologies arose in the context of 1990s, the question about how low-income communities and places are impacted by information technologies also brought in reflections on social equity, particularly on how digital divide occurs and affects people's accessibility to information and resources (Schön et al., 1999). The question continues to be critical in the context of 2010s–2020s when big data analytics, IoT, and urban computation are swiftly and pervasively changing the world's urban landscapes. Who controls the data and how data can be accessed and turned into analytics for potential applications are critical to defining smart city models of our time. Cities should not be designed as an automatic machine that is based on top-down control, a lesson we learned from system theory in 1950s. The latest wave of digital technologies, the age of smart city as Batty defined, increasingly enable individuals to engage with one another, to compute and communicate from the bottom up, while becoming instant global citizens with virtual immediate access to the world's resources of data and information (Batty, 2017).

The smart city is therefore about placemaking, where the new form of city and urban space is to be designed. Can emerging technologies enable good planning that is always driven by social, institutional, and physical contexts? How do new technologies, particularly IoT and data science, engage urban problems that are normally contextual, which is arguably unresolvable by general principles or general prescriptions that are derived from data science, city science, or urban science? How are emerging technologies contextualized for placemaking? These questions are to be addressed in actual practices and experiments of urban systems design for smart cities and communities.

Left: Informational City (Castells, 1989); Right: City of Bits (Mitchell, 1995).

1.1.2. Cities as flows: an emerging new urban form

What are the urban design strategies for the shaping of new urban form that can adapt to changes due to the impacts of digital, sensing, and information technologies? Given that urban and architectural spaces are now both connected globally and grounded locally, the predetermined top-down approach of form making is to be replaced by a more bottom-up approach to address urban spaces that are networked from local to global scales and changed in near real-time through data flows. A more fluid, flexible, and adaptable design approach that explores emerging properties of urban systems from a bottom-up process would be needed.

Among those theoretical propositions and discourses, Batty's editorial on cities as flows, cities of flows in Environment and Planning B in 2011 is the one that is most inspiring. Emerging science of cities in the past decade revolves around the idea that our focus should no longer be on location, but on interactions and connections on networks and processes that define flows between places and spaces. The question of how cities function goes beyond the perspective of geographic location. Cities accommodate flows of energy, material, water, transportation, human movement, and information that operate in systems and networks of some kinds. However, the theories of flows and network tend to be treated narrowly. There was limited research on network morphology for flows and methods for handling ways in which interactions related to locations has barely emerged (Batty and Cheshire, 2011). In this chapter on urban systems design, the physical dimension is emphasized with a focus on the relation between urban form and information, energy, and ecological urban systems behind it. Batty's perspective is broader. His idea of cities as flows or interactions across networks addresses social dynamics behind the form of cities.

Two other research areas address this issue in similar manner: industrial ecology and urban metabolism. The industrial ecology as a rapidly rising area looks at the question of material and energy flows and their life cycle. The attention to urban dimension of material life cycle is increasing in this particular field. Some industrial ecologists and engineers advocate a new research focusing on urban industrial ecology and argue that cities at the systems level are not well understood (Graedel and Allenby, 2010). The empirical study or modeling of material and energy flows in cities began to emerge. Through investigation of data from metropolitan areas, some material flows in cities have been measured and compared (Kennedy et al., 2007). Research of this kind is normally conducted at a grand urban scale; however, they often fail to address how the internal organization of cities performs in the systems. Most works of urban-scale material flow analysis use top-down and input-output model, rather than investigating internal form structure of the urban systems that requires fine-grain data based on bottom-up approach. Research for the relationship between energy and material flows, ecological efficiency, and physical urban form is hardly found. Most papers in industrial ecology focus on product rather than system. There is a need to move from product-based to the system-oriented approaches to mapping material and energy flows in cities.

The other similar idea sees cities as a metabolism to embrace the tracking of flows in cities. Some European scholars proposed a system approach to linking urban design and urban metabolic analysis that was sometimes ignored in English publications. Baccini and Oswald suggested a dual proposition by connecting the morphologic analysis of urban spatial structure and the physiologic analysis of the metabolism behind it. There is an attempt to combine quantitative analysis and mapping of urban form and regional spatial structure on the one hand, and the metabolic processes of energy, matter, water, and human flows in the urban system on the other hand (Oswald and Baccini, 2003; Baccini and Brunner, 2012). Among them, Baccini proposed a solid physiological methodology that quantifies the stocks and flows underlying the metabolic properties of an urban system (Baccini and Brunner, 2012). It is unclear how we could distinguish biological (physiology and communication of life), geographic-geological (climate and topography), and cultural (information on values and economics, e.g.,) flows. Operational approaches to information, energy, and material flows in cities and its connection to urban physical form and design interventions are still largely unexplored. Compared with Baccini's model, Batty's city as flows, a bottom-up cell-based morphological modeling is more socially and economically focused, and to a certain degree metaphorical. Cities as complex systems need a digital city platform to visualize, analyze, design, and evaluate physical or physiological flows in cities that are to be integrated with the social and economic urban dynamics.

Left: Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Engineering (Graedel and Allenby, 2010); Right: Metabolism and the Anthroposphere (Baccini and Brunner, 2012).

How does urban form accommodate flows of all kinds including information, energy, material, water, organism, and human movements that operate in cities, and how patterns of flows can be mapped through locations, patterns, physical configurations that also change over time through dynamic processes? To understand how cities function and how their information, energy, and material flows operate across network systems, there is a need to investigate not only the network per se but also the urban physical form of networks and connections that accommodates flows of all kind in cities. There exist extensive research and evidences on how physical spatial configurations and their changes affect patterns of ecological flows at the levels of landscape and region in the literature of landscape ecology (Forman, 1995; Forman, 2014). It is critically important to explore how those principles could be applied to urban settings. Some urban ecologists pointed out that the physical form of cities only affects human behavior indirectly and its relationship to social and ecological consequences that appears complex, uncertain, and mismatch in scales (Cumming et al., 2006). While some patterns of flows are physical and visible, many others are relational like social relationship, stochastic like water, energy and species flows, or formless like energy flow. The method of measuring and modeling how flows perform on various urban forms will be essential to this agenda. The accumulation of knowledge in performance-based urban form research will sharpen or recreate a set of generic languages of physicality (Batty, 2008) for better describing urban physical forms and their dynamic processes such as density, capacity, threshold, system boundary, and scale dynamics that can potentially be conceptualized or articulated in theories for addressing contemporary ecological issues of urbanism.

The intellectual agenda cannot be fully achieved without addressing flows and its engagement of physical urban structure. To see cities as urban systems, a functional perspective such as energy flow is central which transcends traditional or administrative system boundaries such as the census tract. In the case of urban energy research, it is challenging to define the system boundaries of cities, in which the estimation of energy use varies according to different definition of boundaries and their corresponding spatial scales. Energy flow goes across urban territories and landscapes.

This chapter describes cities as flows, an emerging urban form that are driven by digital, sensing, and smart urban technologies. It makes a clear distinction between the ideas of flows in cities and cities as flows. Flows in cities involve energy, water, material, organism, species flows, human movement, and informational flows that go across territories and scales over different temporal processes. It is therefore essential to understand how cities function by tracking their flows and patterns over time. The proposition of cities as flows sees cities as inherently flow-driven spatial organizations, an urban form of metabolism, and looks at how new urban form emerges from reorganizing patterns and flows of energy, material, water, organism, human, and information.

What constitutes the future urban form of cities as flows, and how do we design for it? The design proposition would allow us to move from the positive question of how cities function and operate to how flow generates urban form, a normative question and a forward-looking perspective. The design proposition and normative questions address physical, performative, and design dimensions of cities as flows, and look at how urban design as an ecological intervention would play a role in the shaping of future urban form by ensuring their high performance of cities. Urban design is seen as a way of synthesizing complex environmental and social problems, a tool to connect analytics and projections of future scenarios based on urban modeling and simulation of flows, as well as an interventional approach to reorganizing urban forms at different scales in a more sustainable way.

1.2. Urban design: designing situational, resilient, and transformative urban spaces

Urban design is becoming data-driven in the context of IoT. Urban environment is now both physical and digital. Cities are an intelligent and interactive environment, in which human's perceptions, experiences, senses, responses, reactions, and decisions are crucial in promoting performance for designing sustainable smart cities. Two intellectual legacies in urban design are introduced here: urban design as a normative theory and a metabolism. They created great impact on how designers transform extensive urban spatial form that is driven by human values, system thinking, and temporal processes for managing urban change.

1.2.1. Intellectual legacy of urban design as a normative theory

There have been long-term debates on what urban design is. At least three models were clearly defined: (1) urban design as a project design, (2) urban design as a process management of a comprehensive policy framework, and (3) urban design as a performance-based city design (Lynch, 1981).

Urban design as a project design is what urban design is normally recognized in practices today. Urban design involves design exercises over a relatively large-scale geographic area, in which there is a definite client, a concrete program, a foreseeable time of completion, and effective control over the significant aspects of built form, such as mixed-use housing, transit-oriented development, retrofitted shopping center, campus planning, midtown or downtown district regeneration, or event-driven project such as Olympics Games park design. The urban project design requires an infrastructural framework, future development programs, and time strategies for implementing the plan. In recent practices, the demands of designing ecologically sound sustainable communities and urban projects increase. Measurement of performance dimension to meet sustainable goals is often required by the cities and communities.

However, urban design is not solely concerned with creating a new urban form by singular influence of design. It is also driven by processes of making a comprehensive plan. To some extent, urban designers have to be involved in consensus making process and implementation through regulatory and policy criteria. Urban design as a comprehensive framework deals with a general spatial arrangement of activities, objects, and buildings over extended spatial and temporal environment, where the client is multiple and the program is normally indeterminate. Urban designers only have partial control over the final form and need to deal with constant change. There is no state of completion. Process tends to be more important than final product of project design in this context.

Kevin Lynch reviewed above models of urban design and theories behind. Urban designers deal with the functional theory for questions of how cities function, operate, and develop. Urban designers also engage the procedure theory, or planning processes about how a project or a plan evolves and is implemented. Lynch also proposed the normative theory, a third urban design model that is driven by values and performance criteria based on questions of what and how cities should be designed to be better. Urban designers address normative questions that contains values. Utopian dreams about future cities and societies are sometimes driving where we should go. He further defined performance dimensions of cities, including vitality, sense, fit, access, and control, efficiency and justice as a framework to guide urban transformation (Lynch, 1981).

The normative model of urban design sees cities as perceived environment, in which how human sensuous experiences are structured is critical to the making of quality urban spaces. The sensuous quality, an experiential dimension of cities is measurable, and to a certain extent designable and manageable for improving performance of urban environment.

In the context of IoT and smart city movement, Lynch's performance-based city design model can be seen as a potential third approach that lays out the foundation of urban systems design. Urban design offers techniques for analyses of how patterns of sensations or urban experiences make up the quality of places (Lynch, 1977). Performance measures of the above sensuous quality should be articulated in design processes. IoT infrastructure empowers and broadens human senses to be pervasive in spatial and temporal environment. AI and big data analytics techniques enable us to measure urban performance that connects to human responses in near real-time using super fine-grain resolution of spatial and temporal data. Urban design as a technique presents a picture of how an urban physical environment ought to be made. Urban systems design is empowered by new technologies to decipher urban forms, complex urban functions, temporal processes of flows, and how to manage urban systems changes by deriving their transformation strategies.

Left: Good City Form (Lynch, 1981); Right: City Sense and City Design Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (Banerjee and Southworth, 1990).

1.2.2. Intellectual legacy of urban metabolism movement in Japan

In modern architecture history, architects and urban designers often envisioned how future cities should be designed. In 1950s–1970s, a group of Japanese architects and urban designers initiated a movement of urban metabolism, a criticism of early modernism to see that the form follows function principle was obsolete. In 1960, a futuristic statement was made in a book Metabolism: The Proposals for a New Urbanism:

Metabolism is the name of the group, in which each member proposes future designs of our coming world through his concrete designs and illustrations. We regard human society as a vital process, a continuous development from atom to nebula. The reason why we use such a biological word, the metabolism, is that, we believe, design and technology should be a denotation of human vitality.

Metabolism: The Proposals for a New Urbanism, 1960.

The Japanese metabolism urban designers were highly praised as the last generation of modern architects that changed architecture (Koolhaas and Obrist, 2012). Most of the metabolism works were crystalized in the context of Post-World War II reconstruction of Japan, in particular of Tokyo during its rapid urban growth in the face of possible future shocks of urban disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons, flooding, and urban fire. Metabolism urban designers developed a method of handling a large-scale spatial transformation to build up a flexible framework to accommodate organic growth. Kenzō Tange, an architecture professor of the University of Tokyo who also helped establish the Department of Urban Engineering, was an intellectual leader of the movement. Tange proposed the Tokyo Bay master plan in the 1960s, an urban growth structure with an 80-km long spine across Tokyo Bay water. A cycle transportation design composed of a series of 9-km loops that grows to a treelike floating city. It is a network infrastructure system to receive future 5 million population on floating housing settlement, and an additional 2.5 million work population in the government buildings, offices, retail, and recreational spaces along the central spine (Koolhaas and Obrist, 2012; Fig. 1.2 Left).

The 1960 Tokyo Bay plan represents a kind of cities as flows, a simultaneous flow system that organize large-scale urban network infrastructures to support future development. However, the flow system of new city was based on motorways. The imagination of metabolism urban form was limited to car-oriented transportation and construction technologies of their time in the 1960s. What new urban form could be created from the logic of new flow system that is grounded on information and communication technologies, sensing systems, and data science and urban automation? A new urban form of a smart and intelligent city should represent flows of data, information, urban automation, AI and human sensing technologies of the current century (Fig. 1.2 Right), not to be determined by flows of car traffic of the motorway systems as the 1960 plan to rely on the 20th century technology. What new network infrastructure should we design as a platform to support how humans react, design, and manage their daily urban environment in situational, responsive, and resilient matters? The answer is not yet clear and to be addressed partially in this book.

Figure 1.2 Cities as flows: Left: a framework of motorway flows system in 1960 Tokyo Bay plan by Kenzō Tange (Koolhaas and Obrist, 2012); Right: 24   hours GPS data of human flows systems, Shinagawa waterfront at Tokyo Bay, 2019.

1.2.3. Urban spaces are situational, resilient, and transformative in the context of