Smart City Site Planning using Autodesk Forma Site Design
Autodesk · Smart Automation · Software
The visuals are the best in the set and the tool does the analysis for you, but there is no code here at all — this belongs to a team with an architecture or planning member, not to a software team looking for an easy win.
What it actually is
Urban planners increasingly test a site's performance — sunlight, wind, noise, carbon — before anything is built. The ask is to design a smart city development of at least one square kilometre in Autodesk Forma, run its built-in environmental analyses, and compare two competing proposals. Despite the Software label, no programming is involved at all.
What to build
A Forma site design of a minimum one square kilometre area including site limits, landscaping, buildings and transportation elements built on Forma's free contextual data, analysed across every function the description names — area metrics, embodied carbon, sun hours, daylight potential, wind, microclimate, noise and solar energy — with two distinct design proposals developed and compared side by side on a Forma Board, and the site BIM model exported for downstream use in Revit.
Smallest thing that wins the room
Put the two proposals side by side on the Forma Board and show one outperforming the other on sun hours and noise while losing on embodied carbon, with the analysis overlays making the trade-off visible rather than asserted.
How crowded this one gets
A guess, projected from the 2025 statements — the last year where both the submission counts and the winners were published.
Quieter than 74% of the 226 · #60 of 226 by expected field
A normal-sized field. Your idea has to be good, not miraculous.
Why: company-sponsored statements drew the smallest fields of all.
This is a guess, not a fact
Nobody has published 2026’s numbers yet. This is an analysed estimate from last year’s pattern, so please do not take it as the truth — check the live counter on the SIH portal before you decide anything. The range covers the middle half of likely outcomes, so one statement in two lands outside it. Entry closes at 500 ideas per statement, so no range goes past that — a statement that reaches the cap fills and shuts rather than drawing an unlimited crowd. The model reads only three things a team can see before choosing — software or hardware, the theme, and what kind of body posted it — and those explain about a quarter of the variation in last year’s field sizes (R² 0.25 on held-out statements). Trust the band more than the number, and the ordering more than either. It cannot see how good your idea is, which is the part that actually decides it.
The scores
The number is the shorthand. The line under it is the reason.
Acceptance potential
3/5The analyses do the heavy lifting for you and the visuals are outstanding, but this is an urban design assignment where architecture students hold every advantage and a software team contributes no code at all.
Feasibility
3/5Forma is accessible and its analyses are built in, so no simulation has to be written — but designing a credible square kilometre of urban fabric is urban planning and architectural work that a computer science team has no training in.
Innovation scope
3/5The tool, the required site elements and the eight analyses are all specified, so the workflow is heavily prescribed and your creative room is confined to the urban design itself.
Clarity
5/5The description states the minimum site area, the four required design elements, the eight named analyses to run, the requirement for two compared proposals, and the exact submission format.
Effort
HeavyTwo full site proposals at one square kilometre each, run through eight analyses and compared, is a large volume of modelling work even with contextual data provided.
Demo-ability
EasyEnvironmental analysis overlays on an urban model are visually spectacular — sun hours and wind fields across a city block read instantly without any explanation.
In its favour
- Green flag: Forma computes all eight analyses natively, so you get rigorous environmental results without writing or validating a single simulation
- Green flag: Analysis overlays across an urban model produce some of the most visually striking output available in the entire problem set
- Green flag: Comparing two proposals gives you an inherently structured narrative — this option wins here, loses there — which makes the presentation write itself
- Green flag: Contextual site data is free within the tool, so there is no data sourcing step at all
Against it
- Red flag: There is no programming in this problem whatsoever, so a software team spends the entire hackathon doing urban design it has never been trained in
- Red flag: A square kilometre is a large site and a design that is dense but urbanistically incoherent will be visible immediately to an architecture-literate judge
- Red flag: Only Forma may be used and AI-generated content is prohibited, so the workflow is locked
- Red flag: Running eight analyses is mechanical; interpreting them into a defensible design argument is the actual skill being judged, and that is planning expertise
What you will be writing
- Autodesk Forma Site Design (mandatory)
- Forma environmental analysis suite (sun, wind, noise, microclimate)
- Embodied carbon and area metrics analysis
- Forma Board proposal comparison
- Site BIM export to Revit
- Contextual GIS data within Forma
- Urban planning
- Environmental building analysis
- Site design
Prior art to read before you start
data-driven urban site planning · environmental performance analysis · comparative design proposal evaluation
Analysed by Claude Opus. Every score above is a judgment call with its reasoning attached — kindly cross-check this against the official statement on the SIH portal before your team commits to it.