The Rapid Urbanism Explorer is an Augmented Intelligence (AI) Platform to support decision makers in developing new urban districts in advanced ways. Rapid iterative virtual prototyping empowers stakeholders to produce complex urbanization scenarios integrating spatial, temporal, socioeconomic and environmental parameters in real time.

Access the latest stable version on explorer.rapidurbanism.com.

Background

Through the Explorer’s low-threshold interface, experts and laypersons alike explore highly relevant questions determining the success of urbanization projects, such as:

• Do landowners receive an adequate return when contributing their lands?
• Do private developers make an adequate profit margin during development?
• Under which terms can financial institutions reasonably provide viable (i.e. low-risk and affordable) credit?
• Is the supplied package of land, infrastructure and housing adequate for private households, leaving no-one behind?
• Are the rights of current land users respected?
• Is the net resource allocation scalable for government, e.g. optimizing the fiscal allocations to benefit a meaningful number of households when compared to the magnitude of the need during rapid urbanization?

Further, the Explorer enables optimization for higher development objectives, including but not limited to:

• Is the overall human habitat adequate: e.g. livable, resilient, safe, productive (providing access to life-affirming socioeconomic opportunities) for All?
• Is the housing adequate, enabling the progressive realization of the Human Right to Adequate Housing within the local context?
• Does the project stimulate inclusive economic growth, including the development of local property, financial and labor markets?
• Is the environmental footprint sufficiently minimized, protecting environmental areas (nudging with climate change adaptation for disaster risk reduction), using resources efficiently, and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions?

Moreover, the Rapid Urbanism Explorer develops scenarios based on data science and in line with sociocultural preferences, thus generating critical information for decision makers. Individual expert users as well as multi-stakeholder collaborators are capacitated to express sociocultural preferences, access open data (e.g. geographic information) and blend these information with market data in order to produce scenarios, to assess the impact of various policy options and, ultimately, vet and prioritize the preferred scenario for implementation. Following the Rapid Urbanism Framework’s planning scales and value chain steps, stakeholders make critical decisions that ensure sustainability, resilience, safety, inclusion, profitability and viability, etc.

The Rapid Urbanism Explorer provides a platform for both in-person and virtual collaboration and decision making. For example, during participatory workshops stakeholders can collaboratively decide upon user inputs, with the option of assistance by a facilitator, moderator or mediator. During crises, including Covid-19, the Explorer empowers stakeholder to maintain or even expand critical planning functions – not only to prevent haphazard urbanization in risk areas or the emergence of informal areas due to lack of planning, but also to aid the economic recovery, inter alia by mobilizing the construction sector and massive employment generation. Doing so, planners and decision makers draw from a sophisticated and integrated data-driven multi-sector, spatial and temporal model, making complex scientific knowledge accessible.

Thereby, beyond the technical questions addressed, the Rapid Urbanism Explorer provides a platform for collaborative decision making, negotiation and mediation. In line with the Harvard-MIT method, stakeholders first collaborate towards the maximization of project net benefits and, thereafter, negotiate how to distribute these benefits. In this context, the Explorer provides an ideal mediation tool for equitably and efficiently distributing benefits, given the costs and risks incurred by individual stakeholders.

The Explorer is a collaborative project of Rapid Urbanism and IAUAI. The for-profit Rapid Urbanism alias Matthias Nohn is the knowledge partner, contributing the Rapid Urbanism Framework under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International License, while IAUAI gGmbH ensures that a base version of the software is made available with a low-threshold benefitting a wide audience for the common good.

The Rapid Urbanism Explorer’s easy use and innovative pricing ensure global application for the common good. The low-threshold user interface ensures that the Explorer is accessible for All, leaving no one behind. In addition, a fair pricing model ensures that non-commercial actors, especially those in rapidly urbanizing societies, are able to access knowledge and software – while for-profit actors, especially those from developed countries, are charged adequate fees. The balanced approach realizes a triple bottom line, contributing towards the local implementation of international agendas – including the Sustainable Development Goals under Agenda 2030, the Paris Declaration under UNFCC, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda under Financing for Development, the Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction, and the Human Right to an Adequate Standard of Living, including Access to Adequate Housing for All.

The Rapid Urbanism Explorer has the power to unleash a multi-trillion-dollar market – while reducing urban poverty and protecting the global commons. Urban population growth is projected to add 1.5 billion urban dwellers till 2030 (or 3.0 billion till 2050), which need to be planned for and adequately housed in the world’s rapidly growing cities, primarily in South Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Assuming $2,000 per capita for serviced land and housing only – or $10,000 for the home of a family of five – this is a 6 trillion dollar market. The Rapid Urbanism Explorer effectively generates spatial, financial and fiscal plans, thus catering to this market potential multiple times across the value chain. Further, the Rapid Urbanism Explorer has the capability to structure nascent markets by aiding the management of intersectoral complexity. In any case, the Rapid Urbanism Explorer reduces planning costs and risks while increasing profits and co-benefits, both on the supply and the demand side of urbanization. Finally, commercial resource mobilization, which in turn contributes to enhancing the software produces co-benefits for All.

Market potential. Conventional urban master planning, by itself, generates fees in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 per hectare for the private planning offices; in addition, resources and costs apply to other stakeholders, particularly government. Finally, many more service fees accumulate across the value chain from territorial planning over master planning down to architecture, over material and construction to, eventually, finance and refinance. The expert-forecasted urban population growth and an average density of 200 people per hectare would result in 7.5 and 15 million hectares of planning area until 2030 and 2050 respectively, which is equivalent to $50 to $150 billion in master planning fees, alone! The Explorer providing, aggregating and integrating critical related services has not only a massive potential for disrupting and capturing a share of this market, but also of actually enabling otherwise distorted markets and of building better cities and strong economies.

In sum, while the Rapid Urbanism Explorer itself, a digital platform and tool, generates by itself a significant revenue potential, the Explorer’s application unlocks and provides access to a multitude of related products and markets, such as material production, real estate management, housing finance and capital market refinance – providing rich opportunities for diversification and further growth.

Growth strategy. The Rapid Urbanism Explorer provides a unique entry point into rapidly urbanizing emerging markets. Multiple expansion strategies and business models based on the Explorer platform are possible, such as:

• Deep AI with advanced human machine interaction, for example for search and optimization of Pareto-optimal scenarios defined in regular language; or
• Geographic expansion across countries and regions, including to developed countries eventually: e.g. Berlin, Germany faces a housing shortage, for which multiple new districts are being considered.
• Vertical diversification along the urbanization value chain, with service products for example for downstream housing finance markets, including respective liquidity facilities with links to international capital markets.
• Horizontal diversification into related value chains, such construction material production and sales, property cadastre services, real estate management, renewable energy.
• Data, possibly including data generated during scenario planning under a freemium model.

Partners and contributors. An initial feasibility study, including a de-risking software dummy, was funded by the Government of Germany and developed in collaboration with the Smart City Living Lab at DFKI and the Junior Professorship Computational Architecture at Bauhaus University Weimar. The first prototype is developed in collaboration with Code the Future (platform development) and researchers from Design Automation Lab at the National University of Singapore (model coding), and with support of The Hilti Foundation. In partnership with Habitat for Humanity, prototype version 0.3 was pilot-tested in the Philippines in 2021.

Acknowledgements. The Rapid Urbanism Framework blends a multitude of professional and academic approaches.

RUE version history.

• RUE00 © 2013-2019
  Excel spreadsheet modeling spatial and financial characteristics of urbanization project, developed by Matthias Nohn alias Rapid Urbanism.
• RUE01 © 2019-2020
  Minimum Viable Product during the feasibility study, financed by KMU-innovativ/BMBF and developed by DFKI.
• RUE02 © 2020
  Early Prototype (discontinued).
• RUE03 © 2020-2022
  First Prototype publicly released, financed by The Hilti Foundation and developed by IAUAI in cooperation with NUS/CTF.
• RUE04 © 2022
  Prototype (discontinued).
• RUE05 © 2023
  Current Prototype, developed by IAUAI for and financed by Matthias Not alias Rapid Urbanism.