Urban visualization: Urban design and computer visualization

Abstract

Historically, the city represents not just a collection of buildings, but also the concrete cosmology of the world. The importance of geometry in this context is that one can be assured that one's understanding of the form of the city will correspond to meaning. It is this reading that is the canonical visualization method of the city form. But contemporary urban designers are confronted by cities with overlapping systems of movement and information that has made the reading of geometry insufficient for an understanding of the city. Our interdisciplinary team of researchers has been studying issues related to urban visualization from the perspectives of urban design and computer visualization. Together, we have published work demonstrating how very large and disparate data sets can be visualized and integrated in unique ways. Building on this existing work that connects the two disciplines, this paper presents a survey of six urban design methodologies that may be useful for visualization. Each approach is described through a brief history, a conceptual overview and a diagrammatic exegesis. The conclusion presents an overview of the complementary natures of the discourses in urban design and computer visualization and a prospectus for application of the identified methodologies to computer urban visualization. We conclude that urban theories can inform urban visualization both as a method of informing generation and run-time simplification of 3D geometric modeling and in managing information visualization overlay issues for the very large, over-lapping data sets.