New Urbanism and Smart Growth: Toward achieving a smart National Taipei University District

•An university district is designed with the planning principles of New Urbanism and Smart Growth movements.•A set of possible design principles are identified based on the planning of Irvine.•Smart growth concentrates growth in compact walkable urban centers to avoid sprawl.•Integrating fuzzy Delphi with Analytic Hierarchy Process for selection of key principles.•Several key design principles are identified and considered as a development index.

New Urbanism and Smart Growth are relatively new approaches to urban design that deals with environmental problems, housing issues, and community well-being. The implementation feasibility and significance of the planning ideas however can vary from place to place. Based on the planning principles of New Urbanism and Smart Growth, this study rigorously and realistically identifies key principles and investigates their relative importance for the planning and designing of the National Taipei University District (Taiwan). An extraction model first elicits knowledge from experts for the purpose of locating key principles. Next, key principles are fed into a simulation model to identify which of the principles should take precedence. This permitted an explicit consideration of local characteristics and background issues in the planning process. Results show that walkability is perceived by experts as the most important principle. While providing for various transportation options is found to be important to the development of the study area, green transportation is clearly not included. These findings suggest that the concept of sustainability is still very abstract and has not become an important planning criterion. Also, stakeholder engagement may be vital to community development planning such as the City of Irvine in the United States, but it is less important in Asian city-region. The results also show a less important role open space preservation has in creating better communities in a small island with a high population density like Taiwan. Thus, although New Urbanism and Smart Growth principles have important impacts on urban design, local circumstances must be taken into account instead of merely following the principles.