Editorial
Indoor and Built
Development trend and challenges
of sustainable urban design in the
digital age
Jianguo Wang1, Shi-Jie Cao1,2 and Chuck Wah Yu3
At present, more than 55% of the world’s population
lives in cities, and this is expected to rise to 68% by
2050, with nearly 90% of the increase in the urban
population occurring in Asia and Africa, especially
for India and China.1 Thanks to the rapid urbaniza-
tion, the proportion of China’s urban population
has increased from 17.92% in 1978 to 58.5% in
2017, which is expected to exceed 60% in 2020.2
The urbanization process has brought about the
rapid socio-economic development of cities, yet
the rapid urbanization process has also led to some
problems related to urban development, such as over-
consumption of resources, increasingly prominent
pollution, frequent occurrence of ‘urban diseases’ and
extreme weather events, continuous deterioration of
living environment quality, etc., which have brought
new challenges to sustainable urban design. Under
this background, analysing the basic theories and
transformation of urban design, discussing new con-
cepts, technologies and methods of urban design, as
well as scientifically recognizing the challenges and
opportunities of the development of urban design can
provide effective solutions based on urban design for
outstanding problems in the rapid process of urban
construction and sustainable development.
Urban design and sustainable
environment
As one of human intervention practice for urban form
evolution, urban design has some common guiding
ideology and professional value system in different his-
torical stages, i.e., paradigm. After experiencing three
generations of historical paradigms including tradition-
al urban design, modernist urban design and green
urban design, the technical concepts and methods of
urban design have acquired some brand-new contents
with the increasing development of ‘digital earth, smart
city, Internet and artificial intelligence’, further form-
ing the fourth paradigm of ‘digital urban design based
on human-computer interaction’. This new paradigm
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Indoor and Built Environment
2021, Vol. 30(1) 3–6
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takes the reconstruction of morphological integrity
theory as the goal, the human–computer interaction
as the approach, and the transformation of technical
methods and tools as the core features. Furthermore,
digital urban design can play a key and supporting role
in the preparation, implementation and management of
urban planning, highlighting the characteristics of
urban history, culture and landscape pattern, further
understanding and constructing fair and just social
norms, and creating a livable and sustainable urban
environment.
Characteristics of digital city
Digital city is one of the basic symbols of transforma-
tion from the industrialization era to the informationi-
zation era, which generally refers to the ability to
effectively acquire, classify and store, automatically
process and intelligently identify massive data in the
category of urban natural, social and economic sys-
tems. Taking advanced information means to support
the city planning, construction, operation, manage-
ment and emergency response can effectively improve
the level of government management and service, and
also promote the sustainable development of city. For
digital urban design, the early digital technologies
include computer aided design (CAD), computer
graphics and virtual reality, satellite images, photo-
graphic survey and geographic information system
(GIS). On this basis, the common ways to construct
three-dimensional city models can include modelling,
1
School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
2
Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
3
International Society of the Built Environment (ISBE), Milton
Keynes, UK
Corresponding author:
Jianguo Wang, Southeast University, Sipailou, China.
Email: wjg-cw@seu.edu.cn
4 Indoor and Built Environment 30(1)
simulation and prediction based on CAD design, digi-
tal photogrammetry techniques and GIS, etc.3 At pre-
sent, the common digital technologies include data
acquisition, analysis and visualization. Based on these
above-mentioned technologies, traditional data are
transitioned to new data (e.g., Internet media), and
sampling data are developed into total data with
more variety and comprehensiveness, and macro exter-
nal observation and statistical data are developed into
micro individual perception and experience data (e.g.,
street scenes, internet hotspots, micro blogs, etc.). With
the rapid development of digital technology, the inno-
vation and development of urban design technology
are constantly breaking through as well, e.g., (i) the
overall picture of the world urbanization based on
night lighting and density distribution, (ii) the world
map based on the accessibility of traffic time, (iii) the
digital historical hologram map based on historical
information, (iv) the digital maps and city imagery
preference information based on mobile phone signal-
ling, Baidu data public preferences and Google Maps,4
through tourists, residents, professionals or govern-
ment agencies to participate in the collection of urban
imagery, and the formation of urban design needs, etc.
The digital urban design technologies can be sum-
marized into the following three characteristics.
One is the design objects with multiple scales.5 With
the support of digital technology, it is possible for
urban design to move towards large scale. In the pro-
cess of rapid urbanization, the development of various
districts in the city can be coordinated and connected,
and it has been the general trend to look at space
beyond the boundaries of space.
The second is the design method of digital quantifi-
cation.6 The digital technology has profoundly changed
people’s cognition and view on the material form and
social structure of the world, which is a brand-new
world cognition, knowledge system and method con-
struction in a sense.
The third is the design process of human–computer
interaction.7 Emphasizing the organic integration of
values and design creativity with the quantitative inte-
gration of multi-source big data has the properties of
accommodating development, continuous optimization
and error correction. The normal operation of interac-
tion system can be achieved by setting a certain value
domain ‘fault tolerance’.
Challenges to urban design and
development
With remarkable achievements for the construction
and development of digital cities, there are some con-
cerned problems, such as the intensification of digital
risks, the similarity of urban forms, the disorder of
urban governance, the prevention of sudden disasters
in cities, and the large difficulty of multi-scale simula-
tion and design.8 Against this backdrop, the article
strives to promote digital urban design towards
wisdom, safety, greenness and refinement by pointing
out the challenges and opportunities faced by the urban
design development.
Digital information and security
The digital revolution is the impetus for the fourth
industrial revolution, yet urban design also needs to con-
sider urgently problems brought about by the rise of
information technology. ‘Digital Lens’ has given us a
deeper understanding of the construction mechanism
of urban form and made ‘City Portrait’ more scientific.
However, there are also existing personal information
leaks and out of control, as the contemporary philoso-
pher Deleuze calls it the phenomenon of ‘divisions’ sub-
division in the ‘controlled society’ brought about by the
code digital language, which requires vigilance, investi-
gation and monitoring in real-time way.
The long-time contradiction between
urban development and historical
protection
Cities have been facing the dual challenges of renewal
and decay, development and preservation. The general
development trend of urban design for historical cities,
historical blocks and sections is to protect and trans-
form historical buildings and insert new ones through
‘weaving and patching’ on the premise of striving to
preserve the original historical structure of the old
city and the integrity of sections, thus forming an
orderly progression of metabolism. Today, digital
urban design provides a new technical tool and
approach for urban historical preservation. For exam-
ple, through the digital stacking technology of histori-
cal maps, the accurate transmission of heritage
historical information of different scales can already
be realized. Besides, the technical problems of the over-
all protection and performance improvement for his-
torical blocks and architectural heritage have been
solved in a brand-new way, aiming to truly realize a
win-win situation between urban development and
protection.
Urban governance capacity and health
As urban development enters the new normal, it is
quite necessary to deal with problems left over from
the rapid development of the city in the early stage.
Therefore, the ‘ecological restoration’ and ‘urban res-
toration’ work are carried out in a refined and
Wang et al.
sustainable way. By combining digital achievements to
clarify the healthy growth of urban form and control the
bottom line of urban governance, the urban development
mode, ‘urban disease’ and urban governance capability
can be effectively changed, controlled and improved.
Urban sudden disaster events
The construction of urban sanitation facilities, build-
ing’s water and sewage systems, and spaces necessary
to deal with sudden disasters (e.g., COVID-19) must be
put on the important agenda,9 which is the most impor-
tant core of modern urban design concepts. When
unprepared disasters strike, the existing norms may
be incomplete and imperfect. Special consideration
should be applied to public buildings and environmen-
tal safety with important attribution to high health and
safety sensitivity, high population density and possible
long-term detention,10 such as free trade market build-
ings, office buildings, high-density residential commu-
nities, etc. Combined with the big data platform, digital
urban environment and health preference information
are formed to provide reference for the revision,
improvement and update of urban design specifica-
tions, thus effectively dealing with urban emergencies
with high uncertainty.11
Optimal design of urban-building physical
environment with multiple scales
The optimal design of multi-scale physical environment
of cities and buildings (including wind, heat and
humidity, air and noise pollution, etc.) provides a deci-
sive role in ensuring the safety, health and comfort of
people.12,13 In the existing research of building physics,
a series of numerical simulation tools based on compu-
tational fluid dynamics have been developed for build-
ing design,14 which can predict air velocity,
temperature and pollutant distributions for small-
scale indoor and outdoor environments with reason-
able accuracy.15 However, when applying the above
simulation tools to urban planning or urban design,
the following problems exist, e.g., the calculation is
too slow and time-consuming to be directly applied
to engineering design; the boundary interfaces of dif-
ferent scales of physical environment simulation are
not clearly constructed; and it is difficult to validate
the simulation results of real complex physical environ-
ment for large scales. Considering the above shortcom-
ings, the integration of GIS, WRF and artificial
intelligence technologies based on fast fluid prediction
theories (e.g., Fast Fluid Dynamics, FFD; low-
dimensional, reduced-order and linear models, etc.)16
is an effective way to achieve efficient and accurate
simulation and design of urban-scale physical
5
environment. In addition, the current physical environ-
ment design of cities and buildings mostly adopts the
idea of pure physical environment optimization with-
out considering the limiting factors of urban planning/
urban design/architectural design, which makes the
optimal physical environment design unable to be
adopted in practical projects. Therefore, taking into
account the design factors of urban and architectural
scales and further establishing an interactive physical
environment design method can promote the applica-
tion, popularization and rapid development of physical
environmental optimization design for urban and
architectural scales.
Authors’ contribution
All authors contributed equally in the preparation of this
manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial sup-
port for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article: The authors would like to acknowledge the financial
support from the 13th Five Year National Science and
Technology Support Key Project of China (No.
2017YPC0702500).
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