An investigation into holistic planning of urban factories

Value creation and manufacturing of products is an important part of cities’ sustainable development. Urban-Factories allow such value creation within urban areas. Although Urban-Factories might have unintended negative impacts on their neighborhood, mainly environmental impacts, their urban location can offer positive impacts for both the surrounding city and the companies. To achieve these positive impacts, the design of Urban-Factories requires studying other extra aspects, such as urban services and logistics. However, the logistics aspect of Urban-Factories is mostly studied when the decisions regarding other design aspects are already made. Yet, overlooking logistics (or any other aspect) in early stages might lead to losing good design solutions, potentially negatively affecting lifetime performance of Urban-Factories. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach for analyzing the design knowledge of Urban-Factories in a holistic manner, while providing attention to logistics aspects. The practicality of the proposed approach is demonstrated with a case study.