Urban Greening Evaluator (Design Assistant)
Intended users
This tool is intended for architects, landscape consultants, sustainability engineers, and urban planners working on building projects that aim to meet green coverage goals, through a combination of ground-level landscaping, intermediate green terraces, rooftop gardens and vertical greenery.
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
Urban developments are increasingly required to compensate for loss of ground-level green space due to building footprints, especially in dense cities like Singapore. Guidelines like Singapore’s Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises (LUSH, Link) policy require developments to meet a minimum Landscape Replacement Area (% of green spaces within a development over total site area).
Yet, designers lack a quick and interactive way to assess total green coverage across building elements (especially for vertical and elevated greenery) during early design stages. They often struggle to interpret how green areas at multiple levels add up to meet policy requirements and translate design options into quantifiable green area contributions.
This tool fills this gap by calculating the % of green area replaced based on user-defined strategies, enabling early feedback and design iteration. This will be especially helpful for building forms that are more complex (e.g., Module 5 Part 2’s twisting building form that was made by 3 different shapes at the top, middle and bottom levels), and thus have different floor plates/areas at different levels.
Inputs
Design Variables (Site)
- Site Area (m²/ ft²)
Design Variables (Green Provision)
- Ground-level Greenery:
- % of setback area (with a cap of 50%, to account for circulation and services)
- Weighting factor of 1
- Intermediate Greenery Settings:
- Interval - e.g., every X floors
- Coverage per floor - % of floor area
- Weighting factor of 1
- Vertical Greenery:
- % of building facade area
- Weighting factor of 0.5 (referencing LUSH guidelines)
- Rooftop Garden:
- % of total rooftop area
- Weighting factor of 1
Green Target
- Landscape Replacement Area (as a % of Site Area; 70% if referencing to LUSH guidlines)
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
The tool computes:
- Total Green Area Provided =
- (Ground Green Space x 1) + (Intermediate Green Spaces x 1) + (Vertical Greenery x 0.5) + (Rooftop Garden x 1)
- Landscape Replacement Area (%) =
- (Total Green Area Provided / Original Site Area) x 100%
Underlying logic uses parametric modeling to compute floor areas, facade area and roof area dynamically to support complex geometries (e.g., twisting forms).
Outputs
- Total green area (m²/ ft²)
- Landscape Replacement Area (%)
- Fulfilment of Target (True/False)
- Component breakdown of Green Areas (ground, intermediate floors, vertical, roof; m²/ ft²)