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Combining different measurement tools, such as floor area ratio and neighborhood scale, allows for more common denominators, an especially important element when presenting projects to community groups and local leaders, who often prioritize neighborhood character and preservation and fear the impacts of increased capacity and population.
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Ocampo added that density lends itself to this kind of tool because without a common understanding of exactly what one is talking about, the term can be misleading. “It doesn’t solve everything, but metrics can be useful to compare different aspects of new communities,” Ocampo said. This global directory of different urban neighborhoods, which covers the block, neighborhood, and city scale, help different practitioners understand how planning and massing can affect a design project. While planners tend to look at population density to determine the need for certain city services, realtors and developers may focus on dwelling unit density to understand sellable or rentable square feet. “The Density Atlas provides tools to help quantify these components.”īreaking down preconceptions of what density means into standard measurements at the same scale, the Atlas aims to create a common language around the impact of how buildings are arranged. “The intersection of financial investment, climate change responsibility, and equitable and just cities is very key,” Ocampo said. Scenes from one of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces’ workshops (Virginia Hanusik) Sasaki inherited the project from famed MIT urbanism professor Tunney Lee, who passed away last year, and relaunched it this past spring. The practice just launched an updated Density Atlas, a collection of diverse urban case studies measuring population density, building size, and floor area ratio, among other characteristics, to help planners, architects, and developers better understand how different facets of density affect design and cost. “Bringing the qualitative and quantitative together is where a lot of urban design resides,” said Mary Anne Ocampo, a principal and urban designer at Sasaki, the interdisciplinary design and architecture firm. With new ways to track and evaluate social and sustainable impacts, designers, planners, and architects can bring more rigor, and ultimately achieve better results, with urban design. That’s why a new breed of data-focused tools and toolkits wants to change how development is measured, to reshape what’s ultimately built.