Holistic design method for the urban acoustic environment

Cities tend to grow over time and more and more rural land around large cities and undeveloped zones within city boarders are being urbanized to house the increasing population. The densification can pose some challenges in the treatment of environmental noise. Building sites are bothersome for residents in the neighborhood, and the increasing number of inhabitants calls for more public transportation in the form of light rails, busses and etc. Undeveloped zones are often buffer zones around railways or trafficated roads and acceptable level of environmental noise is therefore hard to achieve. The planning, design and construction of an urban redevelopment project is in general a complex and time-consuming process. To make changes or add something to an environment that already at the beginning of the design process seams to have reached its limits in certain aspects can become unmanageable. It is therefore important that dialog and collaboration between all the different stakeholders; practitioners within the built environment, politicians and residents is established at the initial design stages to reach a good design solution. In this paper the use of a holistic design tool, taking into account architectural parameters, noise regulations, well-being and soundscape methods is explored. Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods are used to find a desirable design solution.