• parametric
• urban
• design

The research problem addressed in this thesis can be summarized as exploring the Parametric Design practice in urban scale projects, seeking to understand which are the main advantages and disadvantages Parametric Approach leads to the Urban Planning practice. The need for a deep understanding of such approach is driven by the popularity of parametric methods and the potential benefits acknowledged by several theorists, beside the complexity and time required when using parametric methods.
In order to gain an appropriate critical reasoning, a propose for an urban development of a site located in Sydney is realized. The proposed design conforms to the city of Sydney’s objectives for the area while utilizing parametric tools to aid inform generation and functional design layout. The definition of a case study allowed the experimentation of a method developed from a detailed study of the actual ‘state of the art’.
Parametric Design can significantly improve the field of urban design by providing new tools of design investigation and form generation. Regarding Parametric Urbanism this thesis highlights the main advantages in the possibility to easily manage urban data, generating informed projects, more efficient, also through the possibility of using parametric for aesthetical and organizational purposes. Models created with a parametric approach are also very adaptable to different situations and can generate multiple scenarios to be assessed by designers. The negative implications about Parametric Urbanism are the time effort for the construction of a good working model, which implicitly means the challenge of choosing the right parameters to be considered, and also the difficulty in zoom in to different scales starting from a parametric urban definition.