Urban infoscapes: new tools to inform city design and planning

During the past decades, many computer tools have been developed to assist in the environmental design of individual buildings. Heat, light, sound and especially energy consumption can be analyzed in many different packages. This is not generally true for urban design, especially at the medium scale. Although it is widely assumed that urban texture – the pattern of streets, building heights, open spaces and so on – will determine environmental quality both in the buildings and outside, tools for investigating the connections are sparse. The need for medium-scale understanding is confirmed by Givoni (1989):

‘The outdoor temperature, wind speed and solar radiation to which an individual building is exposed is not the regional “synoptic” climate, but the local microclimate as modified by the “structure” of the city, mainly of the neighbourhood where the building is located.’

This paper describes how novel image-processing algorithms could be applied in urban areas to calculate a wide number of parameters. These parameters allow the construction of what we could call ‘urban infoscapes’: a layered collection of information on cities, that can be successfully used to inform urban design and planning.