Shadow Accrual Maps: Efficient Accumulation of City-Scale Shadows Over Time

Large scale shadows from buildings in a city play an important role in determining the environmental quality of public spaces. They can be both beneficial, such as for pedestrians during summer, and detrimental, by impacting vegetation and by blocking direct sunlight. Determining the effects of shadows requires the accumulation of shadows over time across different periods in a year. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient class of approach that uses the properties of sun movement to track the changing position of shadows within a fixed time interval. We use this approach to extend two commonly used shadowing techniques, shadow maps and ray tracing, and demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. Our technique is used to develop an interactive visual analysis system, Shadow Profiler, targeted at city planners and architects that allows them to test the impact of shadows for different development scenarios. We validate the usefulness of this system through case studies set in Manhattan, a dense borough of New York City.Comment: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsZv23d1LyM, Data: https://github.com/ViDA-NYU/shadow-accrual-map

Ways of interpreting urban regeneration: Hamburg, London, Brussels and Rome

Over the coming decades all cities throughout and beyond Europe, be they large or small, will face the great challenge of regeneration. European Commission has promoted a “regeneration agenda” focused on an integrated sustainable approach. But, while the European Commission draws the path, European cities provide a variety of ways to transform drafts in deeds. The four case studies described below – Hamburg, London, Brussels, Rome – give evidence that, in the last decades, every city had drawn its own “regeneration way”, with a different level of sensitiveness regarding the European principles. However, all the case studies deliver at least one action attuned to the principles of a sustainable regeneration, and it’s possible to select from every experience the “good” that has been realized

Winter 1995

https://surface.syr.edu/arc_news/1004/thumbnail.jp

Use of GIS for planning visual surveillance: an analogy to maximum coverage problem

Visual Surveillance is now an essential part of the urban infrastructure in cities like London. One of the primary aims in visual surveillance is to ensure a maximum visual coverage with the least number of surveillance installations, which is analogous to the maximal coverage problem. Starting of with a brief description about the types of visual surveillance (artificial and natural), I will give examples of the rapid spread of visual surveillance. The examples will highlight the traditional approach in the layout of observers in artificial visual surveillance (e.g. CCTV camera), which involves an iterative, manual and gut-feel process of trying various layouts until a satisfactory solution has been found, often producing too many surveillance installations. I will demonstrate how a GIS, can be used to identify the optimal number and locations of observers, ensuring complete visual coverage using an automated technique, namely Rank and Overlap Elimination (ROPE). The ROPE technique is essentially a greedy-search method, which iteratively selects the most visibly dominant observer with minimum overlapping vistas. The talk will also delve a little into measurements to characterise the shape of open spaces, relevant in assessing natural surveillance. One of the key features of the talk will be a demonstration of Isovist Analyst, which is a customised interface to popular geographical information system ArcView, for planning artificial and natural surveillance in indoor and outdoor open spaces, with arbitrary geometry and topology

Spartan Daily, September 14, 2001

Volume 117, Issue 11https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9716/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, September 14, 2001

Volume 117, Issue 11https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9716/thumbnail.jp

The City After: Crises in Contemporary New York Narratives

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

“Speak About Destruction”: Representing 9/11 in The Sopranos

Broadly definable as an interdisciplinary study of televisual texts, literature, and history, this thesis analyses David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999-2007) and its engagement of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Tracing the show’s narrative and aesthetic roots to its pilot episode, I explore how 9/11 elicited both an alteration and an exaggeration of the show’s structural and symbolic elements. Furthermore, I illustrate the impact of televisual mediation on the act of viewership, demonstrating the manner in which The Sopranos and 9/11 newscasts employed authoritative narrative perspectives as a means of disseminating vital information to viewers. Methodologically, I employ a narratological approach to show through close textualanalysis how elements of location and sequential ordering inform the creation of unique story worlds, and how these story worlds operate symbiotically with viewers in creating meanings beyond the texts

Quality housing zoning--application to Tokyo.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-119).M.C.P