A Design Tool Based On Prototype Selection For The Integrative Urban Design Of Urban Agriculture, Green Energy, Water, Urban Space (FEWS)

Under the current rapid urbanization in China, the four basic elements of urbanizationFEWS——Food, Energy, Water, urban Space (FEWS) are under increasingly crisis andshortage. The shrinking agriculture green land away from city brings a series of effectswhich lead to the food shortages; energy shortages caused by the over-reliance on carbonfossil energy; water wasting or floods resulting from the lack of rationality in waterscapedesign; urban space’s inefficient land use brings about scattered spaces. One of the majorcauses of these crises is the separation and mono-thinking of the four elements of city inutilization and development.Urban design in the past usually tends to ignore the mutual integration of the designof the four elements in city. Therefore, the city always lacks the green environment ofurban agriculture land, green energy design does not get enough attention, the waterscapeis not multifunctional, the disorder of urban space, etc. In this paper, inspired by theresearch in the DKS research center, and start from the four elements of city, considercomprehensively to use interdisciplinary subjects, such as artificial intelligence (AI),morphology, urban design, landscape architecture etc. to build a framework of a scientificdesign tool in order to deal with the problems that lead to the crisis of the four elements ofcity, in the meanwhile, to enrich the design tool by the analysis of three outstandingprecedents from different levels in Netherlands. The design tool based on the prototypesfrom the excellent FEWS design precedents will help to guide the urban design processtowards the integration of the four elements more accurately and efficiently.In this paper, the design tool is developed from the following three stages: firstly,build the prototype of the design tool based on research results of the DKS research center,and find out what is required to develop such a design tool; secondly, according to theneed of the former step, enrich the tool by the prototypes obtained from precedentsanalysis; thirdly, also according to the theoretical requirements from the first step, analysisand evaluation the prototype obtained in the second step to help the tool user select theright one while dealing with different design contexts. At the end of the paper is anexperiment design showing how to use the conceptual design tool in a real design of aFEWS theme park.