Smart City Site Planning using Autodesk Forma Site Design

The receipts 🧾

Every red flag on this statement, in full. These are the four places it bites.

1. Exhibit A

   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

2. It gets worse

   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

3. Still reading?

   Only Forma may be used and AI-generated content is prohibited, so the workflow is locked

4. And the finisher

   Running eight analyses is mechanical; interpreting them into a defensible design argument is the actual skill being judged, and that is planning expertise

The damage report 📉

Every score this statement earned, and what each one actually costs you.

• Feasibility

  3/5

  Buildable. Not comfortably. There is a week in here you have not planned for yet.

  Forma 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

  3/5

  Mildly interesting. The novelty will not carry the room; the build has to.

  The 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

  5/5

  The ask is unambiguous, which quietly removes your favourite excuse.

  The 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.

• Acceptance potential

  3/5

  Middle of the pack. This statement will not win the room for you — you will have to.

  The 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.

• Effort

  Heavy

  Heavy. Somebody on this team is not sleeping in week three. Pick who, on purpose.

  Two 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

  Easy

  Easy to demo — and so is everyone else's. Working is the floor here, not the achievement.

  Environmental analysis overlays on an urban model are visually spectacular — sun hours and wind fields across a city block read instantly without any explanation.

• Data

  None supplied

  No dataset comes with this one, so every accuracy figure you quote is a number about labels you invented.

  Nothing is provided with the statement. You are sourcing, cleaning and labelling it yourself, and that work is invisible in the demo but very visible in the questions.

The demo they will have already seen 🪞

Somewhere around 85–190 teams are heading here, and the description is doing the choosing for most of them. They will read the same brief, reach the same architecture, and build a version of the same demo you are planning. Being correct is the floor. If your five minutes could be swapped with the team before you and nobody in the room would notice, you have not picked badly — you have built predictably, which costs exactly the same and hurts more.

What survives 🛡️

The ground worth standing on when the questions start.

• Forma computes all eight analyses natively, so you get rigorous environmental results without writing or validating a single simulation
• Analysis overlays across an urban model produce some of the most visually striking output available in the entire problem set
• Comparing two proposals gives you an inherently structured narrative — this option wins here, loses there — which makes the presentation write itself