Designing the Urban Forest: Toward a visual-functional design decision support system for tree-scapes

This thesis develops and tests a new tree-scape design approach that is simultaneously visual and functional, responds to critical climatic challenges of heat and flood, as well as complex urban spatial conditions to inform crucial decisions about placement and species choice of trees in urban streets. The thesis findings demonstrate that emerging modelling technologies from gaming, animation and architectural sciences can be combined with techniques from geospatial analytics, algorithmic botany and urban forestry, to create a performance-based design-decision-support system, which can assist landscape architects to coalesce divergent criteria of visual, spatial and functional aspects of tree-scape design.