MetaInfrastructure

metaCity smart, sustainable, inclusive

From Research to Software and Sustained Resilience platform and dashboards for people-centred, sustainable and resilient cities

Cities as interconnected systems

People at the centre of urban resilience

Cities are interconnected systems in which infrastructure, the natural environment, economies and communities continuously interact. Climate extremes, ageing infrastructure, cyber-physical disruptions and emerging threats can trigger cascading failures across essential services, while urbanisation and social inequalities increase systemic vulnerabilities.

Our metaCity research advances a people-centred, threat-agnostic approach to urban resilience and sustainability. We explore how cities can maintain essential functions, adapt to disruptions and evolve sustainably over time, integrating scientific evidence, digital innovation and inclusive governance.

People-centric adaptation and recovery linking society, economy, and the natural and built environment before, during and after protracted threats. — People-centric framework for cities affected by protracted cycles of threats. See Kopiika et al. (2026). Nature Cites for details.

Our approach to metaCity

Connecting people, digital transformation and sustained resilience.

People-centred and threat-agnostic urban resilience

We investigate interdependencies and cascading risks across urban infrastructure, services and communities. Our approach combines anticipatory adaptation, emergency response and long-term recovery, focusing on essential urban functions, equitable access to services and participatory decision-making.

Digital and sustainable transformation across scales

We integrate remote sensing, building information modelling (BIM), digital twins, open data and AI-assisted analysis to inform urban planning and adaptation. Connecting buildings, neighbourhoods and city districts, these technologies support the evaluation of alternative development pathways, lifecycle performance, environmental impacts and socioeconomic benefits.

Digital and sustainable transformation across buildings, neighbourhoods and city districts, connecting data, lifecycle assessment, engagement and feedback. — Digital and sustainable transformation of buildings → neighbourhoods → city districts.

Sustained resilience across urban lifecycles

We advance sustained resilience as an integrated perspective on resilience and sustainability, capturing how cities maintain, recover and improve their performance across successive cycles of disruption, adaptation and renewal.

Moving beyond short-term recovery, this lifecycle-oriented approach connects infrastructure functionality, environmental performance, economic viability and social inclusion across urban systems and planning epochs.

Sustained urban resilience across successive epochs, showing decline, fall, recovery and prosperity pathways linked to threats and adaptation. — Sustained resilience of cities across epochs and archetypal pathways. See Mitoulis et al. (2026). npj Urban Sustainability for details.

Urban design & decision support

MetaCity Generator

Software and visualization platform for Sustained Resilience dashboards

In brief. MetaCity Generator connects spatial analysis, design generation and performance evaluation in a single workflow, turning open urban data into evaluated design scenarios in minutes. We are now extending it into a sustained resilience dashboard that shows how a city responds to hazards, to inform sustainable urban development.

1. Why MetaCity Generator

Urban decisions depend on many kinds of evidence: how people move through the city, how much can be built where, and how a proposal performs for residents, developers and government. These questions are usually answered with separate tools and specialists, which makes the process slow, costly and hard to reproduce. MetaCityGenerator[1] brings them together in one parametric environment. When an input changes, every downstream analysis and design updates automatically, so teams can explore and compare options quickly and transparently.

How it works

Stakeholders define requirements such as target floor area ratio (FAR), density and land-use mix. The platform then analyses spatial structure, generates designs within these constraints and evaluates their performance, presenting the results for decision support.

Spatial structure analysis

Space syntax and network centrality measures identify corridors and locations with strong potential for movement and activity.

Generative design

A constraint-optimisation engine allocates building volumes and floor area across parcels within planning limits, linking development to accessibility.

Multi-stakeholder evaluation

Scenarios are assessed for government, developers and residents, considering accessibility, equity, cost, living space, sunlight and visibility.

MetaCityGenerator architecture linking stakeholder planning requirements, design and evaluation modules, and output models through an iterative feedback process. — MetaCityGenerator system architecture: input model, design and evaluation modules, and output model for decision support.

Case-study demonstration

Guangzhou, China

On an urban renewal site in Baiyun District, the reported demonstration completed the workflow from data to evaluated design in approximately five minutes, generating buildings across 156 parcels.

2 km² Urban renewal site

156 Development parcels

≈ 5 min Complete demonstration workflow

In the resulting scheme, 78% of residential units were within 400 m of high-accessibility corridors, and 94% of dwellings met the city’s winter sunlight requirement.

MetaCityGenerator workflow for Baiyun District, Guangzhou, showing data preparation, spatial analysis, design generation, performance evaluation and reporting. — Workflow demonstration for Baiyun District, Guangzhou, from analysis to design generation and evaluation.

In development

Towards a sustained resilience dashboard

We are extending MetaCityGenerator from urban design to urban resilience. The planned dashboard will combine open infrastructure data with population and economic data to simulate how a city responds to hazards, identify disrupted services and affected communities, and explore best- and worst-case outcomes.

It will trace resilience through emergency response, recovery, reconstruction and adaptation. Linking these insights to the design tools will help decision makers prioritise interventions that maintain essential functions and guide recovery towards more sustainable urban development.

Applications and tailored support

The platform and its planned resilience extension are intended to support:

Accessibility and spatial-structure diagnostics to identify critical areas and service gaps.
Scenario-based masterplanning to generate and compare development options.
Multi-stakeholder performance assessment for transparent discussion of competing priorities.
Infrastructure resilience assessment and recovery planning across different time horizons.
Decision-support dashboards and training tailored to each city’s data and needs.

Impact

Our research aims to support more resilient, sustainable and equitable cities by informing evidence-based investment, adaptive urban planning and accountable governance. By combining systems thinking, digital innovation and community priorities, metaCity seeks to strengthen service continuity, reduce environmental impacts and support long-term societal wellbeing and prosperity.

Research underpinning metaCity

Nature Cities · 2026

A new paradigm for resilient and equitable post-war recovery of cities

Kopiika, N., Argyroudis, S., Ouyang, M., & Mitoulis, S. A.

Nature Cities, 3, 304–307 (2026).

Read paper

npj Urban Sustainability · 2026

Sustained resilience as a unifying property of cities and the built environment

Mitoulis, S. A., Kopiika, N., Di Bari, R., & Argyroudis, S.

npj Urban Sustainability, 6, 114 (2026).

Read paper