Data-driven development in the smart city: Generative design for refugee camps in Luxembourg

The paper addresses computational design as a key technological asset in the development of the smart city. In particular, the research targets context-aware adaptation to usage requirements at urban fragment level. Indeed, cities’ policy makers have to take into account many factors in a development policy, such as situational, technical or human-related factors as well as anticipating future usages. Moreover, nowadays, cities are key resources to answer growing humanitarian needs in terms of sheltering and camps. Indeed these situations are increasing due to different factors related to the nature, climate change or human activities. Resilience is therefore essential at the levels of districts, cities and territories. In Luxembourg, a public program aims to develop three container villages for refugees. The objective of this work is to help policy makers and humanitarians in the optimization of the spatial design of camps. The use of parametric modeling approach enables the optimization of space layout planning. It is applied on a case study allowing policy makers to explore scenarios for the decision-making in the camp space planning.