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

Designing urban residential landscapes in arid regions requires careful consideration of water use and costs. Landscape performance assessment at the residential scale has historically been limited to esthetic preferences. Landscapes provide many more services. Quantifying these services allows a comprehensive understanding of the costs and benefits of landscapes. Landscape architecture decisions impact urban planning goals like water-use efficiency, yet the links between planning and planting criteria are rarely evaluated in design decisions. To address these deficiencies, this paper presents a Landscape Decision Assessment Tool (LDAT), a multicriteria, geometrically explicit, multiresolution modeling framework. Its use is targeted to urban planning and water engineering departments in arid regions as well as design practitioners. It aims to improve the multicriteria design of villa landscapes to explicitly include beauty, privacy, shade, views, and water conservation. Results from a typical parcel-level case study in the United Arab Emirates identify substantial opportunities to improve water efficiency without compromising residential design criteria by adjusting landscape configurations. Multiple configurations perform nearly equally well indicating a range of choices for households to choose from based on the household weighting of criteria.