To ensure the comfort of residents, real estate developers and authorities involved in residential area planning take into account not only housing, but also social infrastructure facilities, such as kindergartens and schools, hospitals and clinics, leisure centers, and stadiums. Although master plans for urban development and regulatory documents set guidelines for such planning, in practice they may lag behind the pace of construction. Therefore, it is important to quickly and accurately recalculate the impact of new residential and social projects on the entire city. However, traditional manual calculations take a lot of time, and existing digital tools used by developers assess only individual sites rather than the city as a whole.
A team from ITMO’s Institute of Design and Urban Studies has developed the first Russian service capable of quickly evaluating how well residents are equipped with social infrastructure and predicting how the construction of new residential areas, kindergartens, schools, hospitals, and other facilities will change the demand for social infrastructure throughout the city.
“In major cities, residents of new buildings can choose to take their children to kindergartens and schools both in their district and outside of it. The same is true for residents of other districts. This causes a chain reaction: there aren’t enough places for kids at schools and kindergartens, so they transfer to neighboring districts and take up places meant for others. This redistributes the demand for social facilities in the city and it’s hard to predict where and when this process will end, especially if there are hundreds of new land plots in development. We’ve developed the country’s first service that assesses the availability of social infrastructure on the scale of the entire city, rather than individual areas, and predicts how new residential districts and facilities will affect the city. Predicted demand for social infrastructure is calculated in seconds and can immediately be adjusted for load redistribution and predicted population structure in order to choose the best option. As a result, the service makes it possible to spot gaps in social infrastructure in advance and make construction decisions based on precise calculations,” says Sergey Mityagin, the head of the project and the director of ITMO’s Institute of Design and Urban Studies.
Sergey Mityagin. Photo by Dmitry Grigoryev / ITMO NEWS
The service is a web app that doesn’t require installation. It also utilizes data on existing construction. In order to gauge the number of families residing in a neighborhood, ITMO scientists have additionally developed a model that predicts the population count in accordance with apartment layouts, construction dates, and assessment of where different age groups are more likely to reside.
At the core of the service are optimized graph algorithms and spatial optimization. They work in several stages. First, the developer uses a geoinformation system to prepare a development plan with the locations of new buildings and facilities and uploads the plan to the web application. The app models how many men, women, and children of different ages live in each area. Based on the forecast data, it calculates how many places are available (or lacking) in schools, kindergartens, hospitals, and other social facilities, allocates population demand from the nearest to the farthest facilities, and determines the shortage or surplus of infrastructure. Next, the service creates a digital model. It predicts how the population and infrastructure demand will be redistributed if new buildings and facilities are constructed or old ones are removed. Finally, the service analyzes available land plots for development and suggests the best ones depending on the type and capacity of the facility.
The end result is a series of maps and tables predicting the shortage or surplus of infrastructure within districts and across the city, analytics on where and how many schools, kindergartens, and other facilities are needed, as well as recommendations on optimal locations for new facilities, which are made with consideration for urban planning regulations and actual population demand.
The service can be adapted to any Russian city – for that, only the city’s master plan and the plan for social infrastructure are needed.
“Next, we are planning to integrate our service with transport and engineering models. If a city has approved plans that will be implemented within decades, with our service, we could model various scenarios and analyze in advance how new facilities will affect the city and its transport system, as well as where more electrical substations will be required,” adds Sergey Mityagin.
