Volume 2: Innovative Solutions for Energy Transitions: Part I

Measuring Resilience, Economy, Sustainability, and Human Wellbeing in Multiple Scales for Urban Diagnostics Michael Boynton Tobey, Soowon Chang, Takahiro Yoshida, Robert Brent Binder, Yoshiki Yamagata

Abstract

Climate change, energy security, and individual communities increasingly necessitate using urban modeling and management systems in handling complex challenges of emergent and connected systems. Urban Systems Design attempts to address these issues as a comprehensive framework which can simultaneously evaluate the important metrics of resilience, economy, sustainability, and human well-being. Building upon the Urban Systems Design framework, our study explores different ways of studying scaled problems, evaluation, energy supply and demand, and how best to employ these methods, using the Sumida Ward of Tokyo, Japan as a test case. The proposed evaluation methods can be utilized by city planners and citizens to diagnose existing characteristics of an urban area and to better decide between options for transforming it.

Keywords urban systems design, evaluation criteria, energy and urban metric optimization, urban diagnostics, smart city, urban planning