Planning Support System Development for analyzing environmental performance of form-based design decisions : Case Study of Enschede

The environmental performance of urban neighbourhoods is a crucial indicator to measure the sustainability of the built urban form, especially as cities face increased urbanisation and densified development. With new construction contributing significantly to global carbon emissions, there is a need to understand how introducing modifications in the urban form of a neighbourhood can affect its environmental performance. This research addresses this need by developing a Planning Support System workflow to aid decision-making in urban planning problems, by analysing and visualising environmental performance at the scale of a neighbourhood, specifically the performance of thermal comfort and solar energy potential indicators. It explores the relationship of urban form and the selected indicators of Annual Solar Potential per rooftop and Physiological Equivalent Temperature while utilising freely available 3D geoinformation data of the Netherlands. It develops simplified workflows using established plug-ins and open-source 3D software that can be utilised by smaller municipalities with resource constraints, thus removing barriers to 3D-data based, data-driven decision-making for sustainable and informed urban planning.