Performance-based simulation for the planning and design of hyper-dense urban habitation

The rapid development of the economy and urbanization create great pressure on population of Hong Kong, China and other developing countries. This not only brings great changes on the form and style of the urban sphere, but also, challenges to the natural environment and resources to support urban habitation. Regarding the process of urbanization, the development of the housing industry becomes the focus to resolve the need of materialization for urban living. For this reason, from time to time, technical and economical considerations are always prior to the significance of human settlement environment, humanity, and sustainable development. Considering the deficiency in urban human settlements environment, especially in responsiveness to the natural environment. Information technology (IT) undoubtedly can help to promote and assess the design and planning quality in both environmental and regional microenvironment aspects. A research project - Environmental Responsible Architecture and Urban Design (ERAU) - is established to support urban scale planning, information processing, and computer-aided performance evaluation on both micro- and macro-building design and planning efficiency. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.