Sustainable Urban Form

Book chapter, 2012

The search for more sustainable urban pat­terns is at the core of this article. Often, this discussion does not go further than a discussion concerning com­pact cities versus sprawl. Starting from the importance of higher densities, this article explores the subject of density in relation to urban form much deeper by look­ing into a variety of performances. Issues that will be discussed are, amongst others, the role of density in terms of daylight access, urbanity (or urban vitality) and CO2 emissions. We will see that performances often contradict each other and finding the most sustainable solutions is a question of optimizing all of them simulta­neously. The Spacematrix method (Berghauser Pont and Haupt 2010) will be used as a starting point to do so.