Creating vibrant urban places is a challenging task in urban design due to the intangible feature of urbanity. This paper presents Form Syntax, a design analytical tool that is capable of assisting urbanity making in design practices based on understandings of three essential urban morphological elements and their influences on urbanity. Using the geographical information system (GIS), Form Syntax integrates three methods—Space Syntax, Spacematrix, and Mixed-Use Index—to measure the street-network configuration, building density, and functional mix, respectively. These three components can be quantified and combined to represent urban morphological features, thereby providing a classification of the degree of urbanity. Form Syntax contributes to geodesign by combining quantitative tools with traditional, intuition-based design to achieve a clear visualisation of the degree of urbanity of a place, which can subsequently be used to propose spatial strategies for enhancing vibrant urban places. The Dutch city of Rotterdam is used to illustrate how the tool improves the traditional site analysis, idea evaluation, and proposal evaluation phases of urban design. A GIS add-in has been developed to enhance the appeal of Form Syntax among urban design practitioners.

The relationship between shear environment and physiological characteristics of plant cells is always a crucial and challenging aspect in the scale up of suspension cultivations. In this work, we propose a quantitative method for evaluating the lethal effects of hydrodynamic on Carthamus tinctorius L. cell with computational fluid dynamic (CFD) technology and online capacitance viable cell detection. The study towards the effect of short term shear force on C. tinctorius L. cells was carried out in 5 L bioreactor under various overall shear intensities (0.02–1.82 w/kg), in which an online capacitance electrode was applied to count the dynamic vital cell. A first order kinetic model was achieved to describe the death rate in a time span of 60 min based on the capacitance. A product of the maximum shear stress and shear frequency (SSF) parameter, which is an evolution of energy dissipation/circulation function, was established to relate cell death rate to the shear environment. A good correlation between cell death kinetics and the SSF parameter was observed in the verification test in a 15 L STR bioreactor. SSF can be used to determine the maximum operating range of hydrodynamic stress, and improve the design and optimization of the of C. tinctorius L. cultivation in scale-up process.