Investigating the Impact of Urban Layout Geometry on Urban Flooding

In this paper, we use a procedural generation system to design urban layouts that passively reduce water depth during urban floods. The tool enables designing cities that passively lower flood depth everywhere or in chosen key areas. Our approach integrates a porosity-based hydraulic model and a parameterized urban generation system with an optimization engine so as to find the least cost modification to an initial urban layout. In order to investigate the relationship between urban layout design parameters and flood inundation depth, correlation coefficient method is used. This paper concludes that the most influential urban layout parameters are average road length and the mean parcel area. Keywords-inverse procedural modeling; urban layout design; porosity-based hydraulic model; Pearson correlation; urban flooding.