Steven Jige Quan

Current planning and design decision support systems show limitations in the integration of design, science, and computation. Planning support systems with manual design and post-design evaluations impose major challenges in exploring huge design spaces. Generative design systems largely neglect the wicked nature of design problems and lack appropriate representation methods and simulation tools at the urban scale. To tackle those challenges, this research developed a Smart Design framework feat

The current urban design computation is mostly centered on the professional designer while ignoring the plural dimension of urban design. In addition, available public participation computational tools focus mainly on information and idea sharing, leaving the public excluded in design generation because of their lack of design expertise. To address such an issue, this study develops Urban-GAN, a plural urban design computation system, to provide new technical support for design empowerment, allo

Urban form is considered as two different concepts here: one as geometry and the other as a complex system. This paper uses simulation experiments to test the density and energy performance relationship in nine Shanghai neighborhoods, with the urban form defined as a complex system. The results show a complex pattern. When density is only related to geometry, the density seems to negatively impact building energy use intensity, following the widely perceived conclusion from previously studies. B

The LCZs (Local Climate Zones) system and its mapping have been emerging in recent years as an important approach to study the variations of local climates in cities, which are closely linked to human comfort issues and building energy demand. However, most of the current practices of LCZs mapping are based on 2D satellite images that can only provide rough estimations. This study tries to improve the current LCZs mapping methods by proposing a bottom-up method that adopts high-resolution 3D bui

Solar buildings as one type of decentralized renewable energy systems have been widely adopted to reduce carbon emissions. Related policy making faces two questions: how much total solar energy can be produced in a city and what proportion of building energy use can be supplied by the solar power? These questions remain hard to answer because of the lack of appropriate modeling systems, due to the data inconsistency and the limitation of current building energy and solar potential modeling metho

This paper aims to better understand the impact of urban context on building energy consumption. The factors of external shading, shapes generated from zoning ordinances, and local climate are examined concerning three main questions: (1) how density influences building energy consumption generally, (2) how a given density generates alternative building shapes that have different impacts on energy performance, and (3) how different typologies affect the energy-density relationship. To answer the

In the current pursuit of eco-city development in China, energy efficient residential neighborhood development becomes one of the focuses. While current codes and practices have been paying attention to green building design, building energy is influenced by not only building design, but also complex urban form at a larger spatial scale, which was not well discussed. At the same time, neighborhood design is always regulated by residential zoning codes, which restrict the density measures for eco