Using shape grammars as a rule based approach in urban planning - a report on practice

With the development of user friendly software, using procedural shape grammars has become productive for urban planning projects. Little about the experience of their use by architects and urban planning agencies has been reported yet. This paper will thus discuss the experience gained with the use of shape grammars in the projects of KCAP. We will show how the different scales of urban planning and urban design can be handled and how design concepts can be integrated into the procedural "pipeline" using the software "CityEngine". We will also present an approach of "typological testing" that allows to test various design concepts for their possible developments. This work is the base for current research at ETH, integrating geometric aspects into behavioural simulation processes of urban simulation.