Workshop on City Form

The 2020 Workshop on City Form—in partnership between the City Form Lab and Alphabet Sidewalk Labs—invited a group of students to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) for urban design. Following Kevin Lynch’s investigations of “Good City Form” (1984), the workshop explored how meaningful formal qualities of the built environment can be described and quantified. We  particularly focused on measurable indicators that showed potential to capture qualities that the users of the built environment might value, as well as those that would help complement urban designers' arsenal of existing tools and methods. To test the proposed KPIs, student teams developed a whole range of different urban form and land use proposals for two pilot sites surrounding Commuter Rail stations in Chelsea and Lynn, MA and worked around an iterative design–analysis–redesign process to improve the design outcomes with KPIs.

Download the PDF report of the workshop on the left.

ISBN: 978-0-578-76199-2

References

Lynch, K. (1984). Good city form. MIT Press.

CREDITS

Instructor: Andres Sevtsuk

Teaching Assistant: Kloe Ng

Guest Critics - Sidewalk Labs
Amelia (Meli) Harvey - Senior Computational Designer
Betty Chen - Computational Design Associate
Brian Ho - Senior Design Lead
Saif Haobsh- Computational Designer of Customer Success
Violet Whitney - Senior Product Manager

Guest Critics - MIT
Hashim Sarkis - Dean, School of Architecture and Planning
Nicholas De Monchaux - Professor and Head of Architecture
Rafi Segal - Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism

Students

Carmelo Ignaccolo
Dylan Christopher Halpern
Shuyun Wu
Woowon Chung
Ruben Morgan
Patrick Meredith-Karam
Yueheng Lu
Naksha Satish
Camila Huber
Olivia Serra
Aziz Alhassan