A Web-based Interactive Tool for Urban Fabric Generation: A Case Study of Chinese Rural Context

Abstract

. The design of rural fabric is significant for making sustainable communities and requires innovative design models and prospective work paths. This paper presents an interactive tool based on the web to generate block fabric that responds to the Chinese rural context, consisting of streets, plots, and buildings. The tool is built upon the Browser/Server (B/S) architecture, allowing users to access the generation system via the web simply and to have interactive control over the generation process in a user-friendly way. The underlying tensor field and rule-based system are adopted in the backend to model the fabric subject to multiple factors, with rules extracted from the rural design prototype. The system aims to integrate the procedural model with practical design constraints in the rural context, such as patterns, natural boundaries, elevations, planning structure, and existing streets. The proposed framework supports extensions to different urban or suburban areas, inspiring the promising paths of remote cooperation and generative design for sustainable cities and communities.