Guidelines for Urban Development, RU

Elaboration of generic guidelines for a fictive urban development: a parameter based urban planning tool. The parameters (public space / street coverage / plot area / FAR / etc.) have been postulated by the Moscow based company KB Strelka, part of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. They are referring to three different types of urban environment: suburban / semi-urban / urban.
The task was to illustrate the guidelines and the possible effect of the given parameters. As a working tool, an imaginary base situation within a virtual context has been defined. Within this base layout, the different scenario’s have been run according to successive stages of development. As a result, respective data-sheets with parameters could be extracted.
Besides other critical reservations made by the team, some general remarks were:
- most parameters are sensible for scale (FAR/GSI);
- some parameters are political instruments (POP, area provision);
- some parameters are management tools to control costs (road network);
- the amount of social infrastructure is an outcome of an educational system;
- the amount of non-residential is not always guidable;
- non of the parameters describe or define ‘quality’ (spatial, functional, social, environmental).