of findings across domains of expertise gain relevance. An increasing focus on the quality of operation, social and climatic performance and experience of ‘situations’ can be observed, with more attention given to participation and inclusion in habitats.
More significance is given to engender performance‐ or evidence‐driven decision‐making processes. The immense opportunities to refer to qualitative and quantitative data, to the collection of which also designers contribute with new skills, enable to go beyond professional bias and make informed design decisions. Their engagements and capabilities to participate in the development of computational tools for design generation and simulation, of methods for social inquiry and design and of sustainable material systems both in research and practice extend their procedural capabilities significantly.
In this section, the authors from architectural and social design fields and different engineering backgrounds discuss how innovations in design tools, design thinking, and methodologies can cater to social and environmental sustainability and equity of built environments.
Authors from Arup and Michael BUDIG from the Renewable Architecture Lab at Singapore University of Technology and Design write about innovative renewable materials, flexible designs, business models, and digital technologies as a means to decarbonize buildings. Working on climate change, circular economy, and digital innovation, they address methods that actors from across the built environment value chain can employ to reduce energy and material consumption.
A team of social designers from the Care Lab and Holon highlight a set of principles and practices to address social and relational dimensions in the design of future urban habitation. With projects conducted in Barcelona and Singapore, they share about social and service design methods and tools that can provide new ways to foster the kind of caring urban communities needed to respond to key social challenges.
Trevor Ryan Patt, a computational designer focusing on responsive planning for urban environments proposes generative techniques to reveal new potentials for designing mass housing. Instead, accepting the predominant standardization agent‐based modelling can engender adaptative, localized decision‐making processes, with flexible models that enable collaborative and scenario‐driven approaches.
Timur Dogan from Cornell and J. Alstan Jakubiec from University of Toronto discuss how environmental analysis tools can support the provision of comfortable and sustainable human habitats. They share about building performance tools and highlight how new practices provide radical opportunities for environmental quality and carbon neutrality, that will systematically change design processes.
I'd like to conclude by expressing my great gratitude to the many people that were essential to the making of this book. First of all, I'd like to thank my family for all their tremendous patience and support during a long time of me working on the book. I am particularly grateful to Siew Man Kok, my co‐curator at the symposium, as one important base of this publication. His thoughtful and substantial feedback and inputs on the symposium's agenda, his knowledge on Singapore, and his professional experiences as a public housing designer were an essential contribution also for this publication. For the symposium I'd like to thank Mark Wee and Vinson Chua from the National Design Centre Singapore, the administrative team at the Architecture and Sustainable Design department (in particular Connie Wu), and the Design Singapore Council, Far East Organization, Rice‐Fields, and XTRA Design for their generous financial support. Also, the contributions, such as those by the participants from the Housing & Development Board and National Council for Social Services in Singapore, from my then faculty colleagues at SUTD, and of course the inputs from the many contributors from around the globe, illustrate how essential and inspiring the inclusion of diverse players is – not only for a holistic debate of complex thematic frameworks such as in this book but also for sustainable solutions for future urban habitation as such. Last and not least, I'd like to also thank the people at Wiley – Paul Sayers, Viktoria Hartl‐Vida, Todd Green, Amy Odum, and Skyler Van Valkenburgh – also for their patience with the delays that were caused by the global Corona pandemic.
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Introduction
Oliver Heckmann
Urban Housing Lab, Berlin, Germany
The words ‘inclusive urbanism’