Urban Lab Creates Sustainable Development Plan
- Details
- 19 December 2010 | By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor | 4126
The city of Genoa, Italy, established the Urban Lab in 2007 to create a sustainable development plan for the Mediterranean port city. Designed by 1998 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Renzo Piano, the lab convenes a monthly roundtable called the Table of Ideas to tap the expertise of top design and urban planning professionals from around the world. These collaborative sessions have yielded new urban planning guidelines for large-scale infrastructure projects, urban development, and small-scale revitalization projects.
The City as a New Playground
- Details
- 12 December 2010 | By Rod McCall | 2611
Information technology has changed significantly since its widespread adoption from the mid-80s onwards. Despite evolving to include online social networking, virtual worlds and gaming, it generally remains a socially isolating experience. With users seek to enter a digital world that removes them from their surrounding reality. However, this is certain to change over the next few years. As interest in urban mixed-reality technologies extending from location-aware games or social networking expands to include other technologies, this will encourage people to participate in various aspects of city life. Indeed, this trend is already gaining momentum with location-aware augmented reality applications such as Layer, Wikitude or the results from research project such as IPCity.
Acoustic Multi-Source Sensors Aid Geospatial Situational Awareness
- Details
- 10 December 2010 | By Kevin Corbley | 2886
In the arena of covert intelligence and surveillance, a key aspect of protecting critical infrastructure and securing vulnerable borders is to identify a potential threat before it knows it has been detected. This shifts the element of surprise in favor of the responders, who can neutralize the threat before it has a chance to inflict damage. Moreover, an accurate identification of the threat ensures the level of response will be adequate.
The Evolution of a Mega City: The Case of Ibadan, Nigeria
- Details
- 24 November 2010 | By David T. Afolayan | 3890
The growth of mega-cities around the world poses unique challenges for managing infrastructure, health, communities and transportation. This expansion is near impossible to understand and plan for appropriately without the assistance of spatial information and geospatial technology. Geographic informatiom systems (GIS) and computer-aided design (CAD) are both helping to address these challenges. Yet, other areas that require attention fall more directly to spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and helping to build capacity within policy bodies.BIM for Geo-Analysis (BIM4GeoA)
- Details
- 11 November 2010 | By I. Hijazi, M. Ehlers and S. Zlatanova | 2958
To address the challenges of sustainable management and development of the built environment, engineers and facility managers need to exploit the 3D City models which grown in recent years to include interior space. A crucial issue for facilitating interaction with these 3D city models is the ability to integrate 3D BIM into the geospatial context. This requires the use of specialized software and specific expertise. In order to simplify this process, we proposed an information system that facilitates the use of BIM for geo-analysis purposes.