From Buildings to Cities: Techniques for the Multi-Scale Analysis of Urban Form and Function

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Duncan Smith here at CASA and Andrew Crooks, an assistant professor in the Department of Computational Social Science, at  George Mason University have just finished a new working paper entitled "From Buildings to Cities: Techniques for the Multi-Scale Analysis of Urban Form and Function."

Below is the abstract :

The built environment is a significant factor in many urban processes, yet direct measures of built form are seldom used in geographical studies. Representation and analysis of urban form and function could provide new insights and improve the evidence base for research.

So far progress has been slow due to limited data availability, computational demands, and a lack of methods to integrate built environment data with aggregate geographical analysis. Spatial data and computational improvements are overcoming some of these problems, but there remains a need for techniques to process and aggregate urban form data. Here we develop a Built Environment Model of urban function and dwelling type classifications for Greater London, based on detailed topographic and address-based data (sourced from Ordnance Survey MasterMap).

The multi-scale approach allows the Built Environment Model to be viewed at fine-scales for local planning contexts, and at city-wide scales for aggregate geographical analysis, allowing an improved understanding of urban processes. This flexibility is illustrated in the two examples, that of urban function and residential type analysis, where both local-scale urban clustering and city-wide trends in density and agglomeration are shown. While we demonstrate the multi-scale Built Environment Model to be a viable approach, a number of accuracy issues are identified, including the limitations of 2D data, inaccuracies in commercial function data and problems with temporal attribution. These limitations currently restrict the more advanced applications of the Built Environment Model.

The full title of the paper and reference is:

Smith, D.A. and Crooks, A.T. (2010), From Buildings to Cities: Techniques for the Multi-Scale Analysis of Urban Form and Function, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London): Working Paper 155, London, UK.

You can download the paper direct (2.8Mb pdf) or view the complete 156 strong CASA Working Paper Series.

Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing

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Our latest working paper is now available for download - entitled Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing.

Abstract

The paper first develops the network paradigm that is currently dominating the way we think about the internet and introduce varieties of social networking that are being fashioned in interactive web environments. This serves to ground our arguments about Web 2.0 technologies. These constitute ways in which users of web-based services can take on the role of producers as well as consumers of information that derive from such services with sharing becoming a dominant mode of adding value to such data.

These developments are growing Web 2.0 from the ground up, enabling users to derive hitherto unknown, hidden and even new patterns and correlations in data that imply various kinds of social networking.

We define crowdsourcing and crowdcasting as essential ways in which large groups of users come together to create data and to add value by sharing. This is highly applicable to new forms of mapping. We begin by noting that maps have become important services on the internet with nonproprietary services such as Google Maps being ways in which users can fashion their own functionality. We review various top-down and bottom-up strategies and then present our own contributions in the form of GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base.

We have extended this into an archive of pointers to maps created by this software, which is called MapTube, and we demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing and traditional broadcasting.

The paper concludes by arguing that these developments define a neogeography which is essentially ‘mapping for the masses’.

Download the paper as a pdf (1.8Mb)

Those interested may also like to check out our full working paper series, including the recent The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life.

The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life: Working Paper 142

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The world of Geographic Information (GI) Science has changed. It has experienced expeditious growth over the last few years leading to fundamental changes to the field. Web 2.0, specifically The Cloud, GeoWeb and Wikitecture are revolutionising the way in which we present, share and analyse geographic data.

In this paper we outline and provide working examples a suite of tools which are detailed below, aimed at developing new applications of GIS and related technologies. GeoVUE is one of seven nodes in the National Centre for e-Social Science whose mission it is to develop web-based technologies for the social and geographical sciences. The Node, based at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has developed a suite of free software allowing quick and easy visualisation of geographic data in systems such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Crysis and Second Life.


These tools address two issues, firstly that spatial data is still inherently difficult to share and visualise for the non-GIS trained academic or professional and secondly that a geographic data social network has the potential to dramatically open up data sources for both the public and professional geographer.


With our applications of GMap Creator, and MapTube to name but two, we detail ways to intelligently visualise and share spatial data. This paper concludes with detailing usage and outreach as well as an insight into how such tools are already providing a significant impact to the outreach of geographic information.

Such tools open up a cornucopia of possibilities for the world of GI Science, especially for geovisualisation and it is high time to embrace the Neogeographer, the data and perhaps more importantly the services they are creating.

Welcome to the new world of geographic information.

Authored by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith (Digital Urban) and Dr Andrew Crooks (gisagents.blogspot.com)

You can download the full paper The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life in .pdf format (9.8Mb).

Working Paper: Collaborative Mapping of London Using Google Maps: The LondonProfiler

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Maurizio Gibin, Alex Singleton, Richard Milton, Pablo Mateos & Paul Longley from here at CASA, where Digital Urban is based, have just released a new working paper.

Entitled Collaborative Mapping of London Using Google Maps: The LondonProfiler, it is a must read for anyone interested in the labs Google Map Creator software and the way it can be used to display information.


The papers abstract is as follows:

This paper begins by reviewing the ways in which the innovation of Google Maps has transformed our ability to reference and view geographically referenced data. We describe the ways in which the GMap Creator tool developed under the ESRC National Centre for E Social Science programme enables users to ‘mashup’ thematic choropleth maps using the Google API.

We illustrate the application of GMap Creator using the example of www.londonprofiler.org, which makes it possible to view a range of health, education and other socioeconomic datasets against a backcloth of Google Maps data.

Our conclusions address the ways in which Google Map mashups developed using GMap Creator facilitate online exploratory cartographic visualisation in a range of areas of policy concern.

The paper is available as a PDF (732Kb)Download.

To see the work in action, take a look at the London Profiler site.

At the moment we are working on a new working paper on Neogeography, it should be online later this week as a download....

Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World, Working Paper No. 125

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We present our latest working paper entitled 'Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World'. The paper comes in at approximately 9000 words and explores visualisation in cities ranging from Twitter to Second Life and through to NeoGeography and The Paraverse. The abstract below provides a guide to its content and as the title suggests working papers are a work in progress so any feedback is welcome, the final version comes out in a book next year.

Digital cities are moving well beyond their original conceptions as entities representing the way computers and communications are hard wired into the fabric of the city itself or as being embodied in software so the real city might be manipulated in silico for professional purposes.

As cities have become more ‘computable’, capable of manipulation through their digital content, large areas of social life are migrating to the web, becoming online so-to speak.

Here we focus on the virtual city in software, presenting our speculations about how such cities are moving beyond the desktop to the point where they are rapidly becoming the desktop itself. But a desktop with a difference, a desktop that is part of the web, characterized by a new generation of interactivity between users located at any time in any place.

We first outline the state of the art in virtual city building drawing on the concept of mirror worlds and then comment on the emergence of Web 2.0 and the interactivity that it presumes. We characterize these developments in terms of virtual cities through the virtual world of Second Life, showing how such worlds are moving to the point where serious scientific content and dialogue is characterizing their use often through the metaphor of the city itself.

Download the full paper as a .pdf (1.8Mb).

Imagining the Recursive City: Explorations in Urban Simulacra

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While sorting out our About and Publications pages we noted that Working Paper 98, Imagining the Recursive City: Explorations in Urban Simulacra was not on the blog.

Written in 2005 the paper explores 3D Printing, Virtual Worlds and the Digital City. Its interesting to look back as the Virtual World section focused on our work in Adobe Atmosphere which was sadly dropped by Adobe.

It would be interesting to a take a new look at the paper in terms of Second Life which is what we are currently doing for a forth coming book chapter on Iconic Simulations: Entries to a Recursive World in, Foth, M. (Ed.), Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global, Forthcoming. As is traditional the chapter should be out as a working paper on the blog shortly.

In 'Imagining the Recursive City: Explorations in Urban Simulacra' we view that cities are microcosms of societies, worlds within worlds, which repeat themselves at different spatial scales and over different time horizons.

In the paper, we argue that such recursion is taken to an entirely new level in the digital age where we can represent cities numerically, embed them within computers, scale and distort their representations so that we can embed them within one another, even believing them to be ‘computers’ in their own right. We begin with the conundrum of recursion, showing how its occurrence in cities through spatial similarity at different scales, leads to worlds within worlds.

We illustrate these ideas with a large-scale digital representation of the core of a world city, London, showing how we can generate different realizations of the city for different purposes. We embed these representations within one another, building virtual worlds, moving from the material to the digital and back again, using the digital model to represent the material world in different ways, and finally printing – fabricating the model.

Our message is that digital representation opens a cornucopia of possibilities in representation and communication through a variety of devices which in turn can be embedded in the city, Escher-like, and which indeed are rapidly becoming the city.

Download the full paper (1047KB .pdf)

Digital Urban - The Visual City Working Paper

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We have a new working paper out entitled 'Digital Urban - The Visual City', hopefully worth a read...

Nothing in the city is experienced by itself for a city’s perspicacity is the sum of its surroundings. To paraphrase Lynch (1960), at every instant, there is more than we can see and hear. This is the reality of the physical city, and thus in order to replicate the visual experience of the city within digital space, the space itself must convey to the user a sense of place.

This is what we term the “Visual City”, a visually recognisable city built out of the digital equivalent of bricks and mortar, polygons, textures, and most importantly data.

Recently there has been a revolution in the production and distribution of digital artefacts which represent the visual city. Digital city software that was once in the domain of high powered personal computers, research labs and professional software are now in the domain of the public-at-large through both the web and low-end home computing.

These developments have gone hand in hand with the re-emergence of geography and geographic location as a way of tagging information to non-proprietary web-based software such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, ESRI’s ArcExplorer, and NASA’s World Wind, amongst others.

The move towards ‘digital earths’ for the distribution of geographic information has, without doubt, opened up a widespread demand for the visualization of our environment where the emphasis is now on the third dimension.

While the third dimension is central to the development of the digital or visual city, this is not the only way the city can be visualized for a number of emerging tools and ‘mashups’ are enabling visual data to be tagged geographically using a cornucopia of multimedia systems.

We explore these social, textual, geographical, and visual technologies throughout this latest working paper.

Download the full working paper (4.9Mb, .pdf)

The Model City - Working Paper Series 113

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Professor Michael Batty at our lab is one of the leading lights in city based modelling, in his latest working paper he defines how the term ‘model’ is now central to our thinking about how we understand and design cities.

In the paper:

We suggest a variety of ways in which we use ‘models’, linking these ideas to Abercrombie’s exposition of Town and Country Planning which represented the state of the art fifty years ago.

Here we focus on using models as physical representations of the city, tracing the development of symbolic models where the focus is on simulating how function generates form, to iconic models where the focus is on representing the geometry of form in both two and three dimensions.

Our quest is to show how digital representation enables us to merge and manipulate form into function and vice versa, linking traditional architectural representation to patterns of land use and movement. Mathematics holds the key to simulation of many kinds and computers now enable us to move effortlessly from the material world of atoms to the ethereal world of bits and back.

These new tools also provide us with powerful ways of showing how the real is able to morph into the ideal and vice versa. We argue that this digital world which parallels the material, now gives us unprecedented power to understand and explore cities in ways that Abercrombie could only speculate upon, and we conclude by anticipating how we might respond to the new challenges posed by unlimited access to these virtual worlds.

The paper is well worth a download (2.3Mb, PDF) and covers a lot of the work and topics featured in the blog.

We will have a new Working Paper, entitled The Visual City available for download shortly.

Working Paper - Public Domain GIS, Mapping & Imaging Using Web-based Services

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We have a new working paper out entitled: Public Domain GIS, Mapping & Imaging Using Web-based Services by Andrew Hudson-Smith, Richard Milton, Michael Batty, Maurizio Gibin, Paul Longley, Alex Singleton.

The paper outlines Google Map Creator, Image Cutter, Google Earth Creator, Map Tube and our recent work in Second Life.

In the last five years, public domain GIS (geographic information systems) software for map display and beyond has become available for non-expert users in the public domain, the best examples being the various products from Google such as Google Maps and Google Earth.

We have devised various software to enable non-experts to take appropriate map data in standard formats and to transform them so that they can be displayed by these software in a one stop action.

The first system is called GMapCreator and we show how the software can be used to produce any number of map layers which can be overlaid on Google Maps, can be combined and toggled in combination, and whose transparency can be varied for a myriad of presentation purposes.

We then evolve this into a form called ImageCutter which takes any large image and puts this into a Google Map so that the zoom and pan features of the software can be exploited. These software are now available through a site we call MapTube which is a server pointing to various maps created by GMapCreator which is a rudimentary archive of virtual map resources.

Finally, we sketch how these software are being moved into 3D using the capabilities of Google Earth and Second Life to display geographic imagery.

You can download the working paper in .pdf format (3301KB)