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The described study aims to find correlations between urban spatial configurations and human emotions. To this end, the authors measured people's emotions while they walk along a path in an urban area using an instrument that measures skin conductance and skin temperature. The corresponding locations of the test persons were measured recorded by using a GPS-tracker (n=13). The results are interpreted and categorized as measures for positive and negative emotional arousal. To evaluate the technical and methodological process. The test results offer initial evidence that certain spaces or spatial sequences do cause positive or negative emotional arousal while others are relatively neutral. To achieve the goal of the study, the outcome was used as a basis for the study of testing correlations between people's emotional responses and urban spatial configurations represented by Isovist properties of the urban form. By using their model the authors can explain negative emotional arousal for certain places, but they couldn't find a model to predict emotional responses for individual spatial configurations.

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages.

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One of the most important consequences of digitalization and the progress of artificial intelligence is automation in all areas of life. In this paper we investigate the automation of urban design. Based on four levels of automation, we provide a conceptual framework for the classification and comparison of various urban design automation approaches and consider the scope of their applicability and the division of tasks between humans and computers. The proposed framework is applied in two demonstration projects. Finally, we discuss the technical needs and possibilities for increasing urban design automation, as well as the implications these are expected to have for the profession of urban designers and architects.

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