The role of analytical models and their circulation in urban studies and policy

Cities are so complex that we constantly build models to represent them, understand them and attempt to plan them. Models represent a middle ground between the singular configurations of cities and universal theories. This is what makes them valuable and prone to circulate (between places, institutions and languages) and evolve to adapt to new...

3D building metrics for urban morphology

Urban morphology is important in a broad range of investigations across the fields of city planning, transportation, climate, energy, and urban data science. Characterising buildings with a set of numerical metrics is fundamental to studying the urban form. Despite the rapid developments in 3D geoinformation science, and the growing 3D data...

Feature-preserving 3D Mesh Simplification for Urban Buildings

The goal of urban building mesh simplification is to generate a compact representation of a building from a given mesh. Local smoothness and sharp contours of urban buildings are important features for converting unstructured data into solid models, which should be preserved during the simplification. In this paper, we present a general method...

Night and Fog of Hong Kong: Balancing development and polycentric urban model exploration of Hong Kong in Pearl River Delta, Urban regeneration strategies in search for improving cohesion at Tin Shui Wai new town within the Hong Kong extended region

Due to the restricted functional collaboration between Hong Kong and Shenzhen Region as well as Pearl River Delta, the functional construction of Hong Kong Region becomes a mono-centric system which leads to a serious unbalanced development between its city centre and its peripheral new towns with great potential. However, the new planning...

Estimating the impacts of urban growth on future flood risk: A comparative study

The unprecedented growth of cities has a significant impact on future flood risk that might exceed the impacts of climate change in many metropolitan areas across the world. Although the effects of urbanisation on flood risk are well understood, assessments that include spatially explicit future growth projections are limited. This comparative...

Generating 3D city models without elevation data

Elevation datasets (e.g. point clouds) are an essential but often unavailable ingredient for the construction of 3D city models. We investigate in this paper to what extent can 3D city models be generated solely from 2D data without elevation measurements. We show that it is possible to predict the height of buildings from 2D data (their...

A semantic approach to patch-based procedural generation of urban road networks

A road network is one of the core elements of urban environments, strongly defining their layout. Procedural modeling has been increasingly used to create such road networks. However, many procedural methods are complex and difficult to master by non-experts, often have a limited and hard-to-control expressive range, and require a variety of...

A semantic approach to patch-based procedural generation of urban road networks

A road network is one of the core elements of urban environments, strongly defining their layout. Procedural modeling has been increasingly used to create such road networks. However, many procedural methods are complex and difficult to master by non-experts, often have a limited and hard-to-control expressive range, and require a variety of...

Towards 3D raster GIS: On developing a raster engine for spatial DBMS

Three-dimensional (3D) raster are simple representations, which have long been used for modelling continuous phenomena such as geological and medical objects. However, they can result in large data sets when high resolution is used, which poses challenges to algorithms for vector-to-raster conversion and data storage. This paper presents a...

Better Half of Bangalore: Improving spatial conditions for women working in blue- and white-collar industry

In the case of a relatively traditional society like India, on the one hand gender roles are strongly enforced, while on the other hand the continuous feminization of the workforce has been a result of the liberalization of global policies in the early 90’s. The still present binary definition of gender is confining men to the productive space...

Applications of 3D City Models: State of the Art Review

In the last decades, 3D city models appear to have been predominantly used for visualisation; however, today they are being increasingly employed in a number of domains and for a large range of tasks beyond visualisation. In this paper, we seek to understand and document the state of the art regarding the utilisation of 3D city models across...

Advancing Open 3D Modelling Standards in National Spatial Information Policy

Individuals and organisations around the world - facing extraordinary challenges and new opportunities - are together engaged in numerous projects, involving natural and built environments. Spatial information policy is at the heart of these projects. The information technologies available enable individuals to observe, measure, describe, map...

New town modeling: Reviewing Dutch new towns via quantitative methods to provide appropriate tools and strategy for accelerating Chinese new town development, using songjiang new town as the test case

China turned to the Open-Policy in 1978 and began its rapid urbanization process. To handle the urgent demand from working migration and reduce the problems triggered by congestion in mega cities, decentralization and new towns are widely accepted by Chinese urbanists and politicians. However, new towns in China lost their urbanity in the...

Amsterdam and its Region as a Layering of Socio-Technical Systems

Space syntax reveals structure in the plans of cities. It misses however an explanation of how this structure arises and what it means. We argue political geographies are structured by the way we have constructed them historically as social organisation, and the means (technique) we have used. These structures depend on a layering of state of...

Selecting 3D urban visualisation models for disaster management: Fethiye tsunami inundation case

Urban 3D visualisation rarely considers integrated data visualisation in disaster management. In general, such methods should incorporate interoperable approaches and data to avoid duplicating efforts and to reduce costs. To achieve such interoperability, it is important to investigate the link between the types of potential hazards and the...

Selecting 3D urban visualisation models to support urban disaster management: A rule-based approach