Integrated Systems Modeling for Sustainable Urban Development

The fields of urban planning, environmental engineering, architecture, and community management need new approaches to address the challenges of the 21st century in order to build truly sustainable Cities of the Future. For both new development and re-development projects, public-sector planners and private-sector developers are struggling with with the challenge of how to define sustainability and how to translate this concept into urban form, infrastructure solutions, and building designs.CDM has endeavored to develop an urban systems model to support decision-making for sustainable development. The systems model will provide a platform for simulating design and technology alternatives related to energy consumption, generation, water consumption, goods movement, and people movement, among others. All of these elements and activities are interconnected and influence each other as a complex system. Truly efficient, elegant, cost-effective – and therefore sustainable – designs must seek the potential synergies among these systems and design components.This paper presents the development and evolution of an urban systems model, through conceptualization of the model, to early prototype applications at both site development and City scales.