Urban planners, developers, and community groups will soon be able to test changes to a virtual city—adjusting transport routes, land use, or housing density—and see the knock-on effects on pollution, energy demand, and social segregation, all through a web browser. Currently, modelling how a city’s systems interact is slow, expensive, and locked inside specialist software used by a handful of experts. This keeps integrated planning out of reach for most local authorities, developers, and community stakeholders. SYNC aims to open that process up. It is a web service that automates the complex calculations linking physical form, transport infrastructure, land use, economic activity, and environmental performance. If successful, SYNC could make integrated urban modelling a routine part of planning decisions rather than a rare, costly exercise. A local council could quickly test how a new housing development might affect traffic patterns, air quality, and access to schools. Developers could compare the environmental and social impacts of different design options before breaking ground. The project is taking a pre-beta prototype to market release through product development, case studies, and trials with future users. The goal is not to build a better model in isolation, but to put that modelling power into more hands.
View original technical description
SYNC is web service that enables users to model the interdependencies between multiple urban systems online. The service provides tools to manipulate the physical form, transport infrastructure, land use activity, social, economic and environmental conditions of virtual cities and explore the implications of these changes directly via a web interface. SYNC provides outputs relevant to a wide range of urban planning, design and management problems such as forecasting demographic change, travel patterns, environmental performance, energy consumption, pollution rates and exposures, infrastructure demands, land use and rent distributions, access to health and education resources and socio-economic segregation, all building on relationships between urban sub-systems. SYNC has also been designed to speed up, simplify and automate model procedures and provide a user experience that makes direct online modelling possible. We believe that a successful future for our cities will only be realised if integrated modelling resources are opened up to a much wider market and used more frequently in the planning and design process. We aim to achieve this by providing the technology to democratise the generation of model outputs and help different professional and community stakeholders to collaborate on shared challenges. SYNC is being developed by a team of researchers from University College London and is being supported by UCL Business and The Future Cities Catapult in taking the product to market. Our project will take SYNC from a pre-beta prototype to market release through a structured programme of product development, market research and collaborative engagement with future license holders, developer API users, data providers, web service providers and trials of the consumer service via beta release. We will demonstrate the power of this approach by applying the service to a number of case study projects and undertaking trials of a beta release with members of the prospective user base.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know