Publication Highlight: Multicriteria, Multiresolution Modeling of Suburban Residential Landscape Alternatives: Water-Efficient Villas in the Arid Middle East

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Historically, landscape performance at the residential scale has been limited to aesthetic preferences. However, landscape architecture decisions also impact urban planning goals like water-use efficiency. In this way, designing urban residential landscapes in arid regions requires careful consideration of water use and costs and the linkages between landscapes and their many services.  

In a recently published ASCE article, Dr. Sarah Fletcher and her coauthors present a Landscape Decision Assessment Tool (LDAT) targeted to urban planning and water engineering departments in arid regions and design practitioners to address these residential landscape design decision-making deficiencies. “LDAT is a multicriteria, geometrically explicit, multiresolution modeling framework that aims to improve the multicriteria design of villa landscapes to explicitly include beauty, privacy, shade, views, and water conservation” (Birge et al., 2022).

Read more about LDAT in the full article that is linked below!