Urban Design Performance Indicators

Following Kevin Lynch’s investigations of “Good City Form” (1984), this 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.

Project website

The Workshop on City Form was conducted in Spring 2020 together with a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The workshop explored how formal qualities in the built environment can be quantified and measured. Through a series of iterative design-analysis-redesign process, students eventually developed individual key performance indicators relevant for urban design. Two rail stations (Chelsea and Lynn Stations) on the Rockport Line in Massachusetts were selected as case studies.


Studio Instructor
Andres Sevtusk

Teaching Assistant
Kloe Ng 

Students
Patrick Stephen Meredith-Karam, Ruben Grayson Morgan, Yueheng Lu, Carmelo Ignaccolo, Dylan Christopher Halpern, Wu Shuyun, Naksha Satish, Woowon Chung, Olivia P Serra, Camila Huber Barbosa, Abdulaziz Abdulrahman Alhassan


Studio Sponsor
Sidewalk Labs


Guest Critics - Sidewalk Labs
Amelia (Meli) Harvey 
Betty Chen 
Brian Ho 
Saif Haobsh
Violet Whitney 


Guest Critics - MIT
Hashim Sarkis 
Nicholas De Monchaux 
Rafi Segal 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tod4afhnfjykvsq/workshop_cityform_20sep.pdf?dl=0