Zoning & Walkability Lab — Urban Land-Use Simulator

Zoning Brush

Planning Priorities

Walk decay β (willingness to walk) 0.35

Green-space weight 1.00×

Live Metrics

Walkability (gravity accessibility)

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Mixed-Use Diversity (Shannon entropy)

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Community Well-Being Score

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Residential cells

Heritage sites

How it works

Click a cell (or drag) to paint it with the selected zone type on a 9×9 city-block grid rendered as a live 3D massing model. Three quantities recompute after every edit:

Walkability (gravity model):
  A_i = Σ_amenities  w_type · exp(−β · d(i, amenity))
  score = 100 · (1 − exp(−mean(A_i) / 2.5))
  averaged over all residential cells i

Mixed-Use Diversity (Shannon entropy):
  H = −Σ p_k · ln(p_k),  k over the 5 zone types
  diversity% = 100 · mean(H / ln 5)
  computed per occupied cell from its radius-2 neighbourhood

Well-Being = clamp( 0.45·Walkability + 0.35·Diversity
                     + 10·greenWeight·greenAccess
                     − industrialPenalty ,  0, 100 )

β (decay) — a steeper gravity-model decay means people only count amenities within a short walk; lower β lets far-away shops and parks still contribute.
Green weight — how much a planner values proximity to parks when scoring well-being, independent of the walkability figure itself.
Industrial penalty — every residential cell within 3 grid cells of an industrial cell loses well-being points proportional to how close it is, modelling noise/pollution exposure.
Heritage sites — purple towers are never redeveloped by the "Random Starter Plan" button once placed by you; the counter tracks cultural-preservation of the block.

This mirrors real land-use planning tools: gravity accessibility models (Hansen 1959) drive walkability scoring in transportation planning, and entropy-based land-use mix indices are a standard smart-growth metric for judging whether a neighbourhood supports daily needs on foot.

Click a grid cell to zone it

Residential Commercial Industrial Green Heritage

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