Green Infrastructure and Urban-Renewal Simulation for Street Tree Design Decision-Making: Moderating Demands of Stormwater Management, Sunlight and Visual Aesthetics

Abstract

The design of green infrastructure in urban renewal sites is complex, requiring engagement with existing communities and future sustainable development goals, consideration of existing and future urban forms, changing climatic conditions, and the sites often being in low-lying and flood-prone areas. Traditional street tree decision-making approaches are inadequate for addressing the scale, environmental complexity, and mutability of decisions involved in urban renewal projects—new tree selection approaches that consider complex competing criteria for tree selections addressing stormwater management systems, visual assessment and solar amenity are needed. This paper describes a new method of multi-criteria street design decision modelling that combines outputs from hydrology modelling, digital procedural tree modelling and urban form analysis, with animation and gaming technologies. We evaluate our approach through application to the design of a large-scale, urban renewal project underway in Melbourne, Australia. The results of the study demonstrate the functionality of our model, which allowed the simultaneous output of streetscape visualisation, with tree selection responding to integrated stormwater management infrastructure and flooding, along with the likely overshadowing conditions of urban renewal built-form. Our multi-criteria approach makes a significant contribution to the tools available to urban designers, planners and landscape architects in their pursuit of smarter streetscape design decisions that respond to complex spatial, cultural and climatic urban challenges.

Urban Stream Corridors and Forest Patches—The Connections: A Case Study of Bloomington, IN

“…Few studies have examined relationships between UFPs and urban stream ecosystems. Studies observing forest and stream interactions either take place in rural areas, analyze habitat connectivity, or focus on an urban forest system's ability to provide green stormwater infrastructure [3,14,17,19,20,62,64]. Future research could look at the relationship between streams and UFPs in larger cities.…”

“…Most areas with high, uninterrupted ISC coincide with artificially buried streams. Breaking up these parking lots with greenspaces or pervious landcover, daylighting streams, and planting street trees could help alleviate potential flooding [4,19,64].…”

Performance assessment of the ecosystem services provided by urban Nature-based solutions: focus on rainwater management

“…Six models were included in the selection grid. The equations were either unfindable or only partially specified for most of the remaining models [32,35,56]. The three remaining models were all robust but one of them was dismissed because it simulated only the interception process, which isn't enough to determine runoff or retention [36].…”

A Bibliometric Review of Nature-Based Solutions on Urban Stormwater Management

“…NBS is a complex and multi-dimensional concept that encompasses a wide range of strategies and techniques to address environmental and social challenges [28]. There is a variety of terminologies associated with NBS which can sometimes cause confusion and inconsistencies in the research [29][30][31]. Therefore, the authors also included articles that used general definitions similar to NBS, such as green space, parks, urban forests, green roofs, green walls, memorial parking trees, and green swales, among others.…”