A BIM-GIS Valuation Model of Urban Green Infrastructure Project

The research work has the main purpose to build an assessment tool of ecosystem services of urban projects, capable of interfacing with project’s Building Information Model (BIM), and able to define spatial relationships with the main components of the territory. The architect and urban designer should take account of multiple objectives in a changing environment and the balance between the built and the green infrastructure. Adopting an easy to use computational tool, the assessment starts at the early stage of the design (i.e. when it can be most effective because some design choices are changeable) and non-expert awareness can push sustainability to become a critical driving factor of the design process. Regarding the method, after a review of the literature on existing assessment tools, the study identifies a number of tools that offer pre-packaged systems for the calculation of ecosystem benefits and highlights their limits and advantages. Some of them focus on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software defining a set of spatial relationships between green infrastructure and built environment. The new tool uses different tools based on BIM and GIS software proprietary and open source, beginning to investigate and making effective their interoperability. As the results, the tool developed considers the benefits according to different thematic areas Climate change adaptation and mitigation, Flood alleviation and water management, Health and well-being, Land and property values and Soundscape. The toolkit test runs on a park project in the city of Rotterdam. In conclusion, the analysis of existing tools and the need to find a model that uses the instruments connected to the project and the architect’s working methods, brought the idea to focus successively on the BIM - GIS interoperability through which connect the two technologies and allow the correct relationship between design and land model on which the project was dropped.