Staging urban emergence through collective creativity: Devising an outdoor mobile augmented reality tool

The unpredictability of global geopolitical conflicts, economic trends, and impacts of climate change, coupled with an increasing urban population, necessitates a more profound commitment to resilience thinking in urban planning and design. In contrast to top-down planning and designing for sustainability, allowing for emergence to take place seems to contribute to a capacity to better deal with this complex unpredictability, by allowing incremental changes through bottom-up, self-organized adaptation made by diverse actors in the proximity of various social, economical and functional entities in the urban context.The present thesis looks into the processes of creating urban emergence from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The theoretical section of the thesis first looks into the relationship between the processes and the qualities of a compact city. The Japanese city of Tokyo is used as an example of a resilient compact city that continuously emerges through incremental micro-adaptations by individual actors guided by urban rules that ‘let it happen’ without much central control or top-down design of the individual outcomes. The thesis then connects such rule-based emergent processes and the qualities of a compact city to complex adaptive system’s (CAS) theory, emphasizing the value of incremental and individual multiple-stakeholder input. The latter part of the thesis focuses on how to create a platform that can combine the bottom-up, emergent, rule-based planning approaches, and collective creativity based on individual participation and input from the public. This section is dedicated to developing a tool for a collaborative urban design using outdoor mobile augmented reality (MAR) by research-through-design method.The thesis thus has three parts addressing the topics: 1. urban planning processes and resulting urban qualities concerning compact city – i.e., density and diversity; 2. the processes of urban emergence, which generates complexity that renders urban resilience from the urban planning theory perspective; 3. developing a tool for non-expert citizens and other stakeholders to design and visualize an urban neighborhood by simulating the rule-based urban emergence using outdoor MAR. The results include a proposal for a complementary hybrid planning approaches that might approximate the CAS in urban systems with qualities that contribute to urban resiliency. Thereafter, the results describe specifications and design criteria for a tool as a public collaborative design platform using outdoor MAR to promote public participation: Urban CoBuilder. The processes of developing and prototyping such a tool to test various urban concepts concerning identified adaptive urban planning approaches are also presented with an assessment of the MAR tool based on focus group user tests. Future studies need to better include the potential of crowdsourcing public creativity through mass participation using the collaborative design tool and actual integration of these participatory design results in urban policies

The Urban CoCreation Lab—An Integrated Platform for Remote and Simultaneous Collaborative Urban Planning and Design through Web-Based Desktop 3D Modeling, Head-Mounted Virtual Reality and Mobile Augmented Reality: Prototyping a Minimum Viable Product and Developing Specifications for a Minimum Marketable Product

Both policy and research highlight the importance of diverse stakeholder input in urban development processes but visualizing future built environments and creating two-way design communication for non-expert stakeholders are challenging. The present study develops an intuitive and simplified 3D modeling platform that integrates web-based desktop, virtual reality and mobile augmented reality technologies for remote simultaneous urban design collaboration. Through iterative prototyping, based on two series of workshops with stakeholders, the study resulted in such an integrated platform as a minimum viable product as well as specifications for a minimum marketable product to be used in real projects. Further study is required to evaluate the minimum level of detail in the 3D modeling necessary for good perception of scale and environmental impact simulation

Iterative Prototyping of Urban CoBuilder: Tracking Methods and User Interface of an Outdoor Mobile Augmented Reality Tool for Co‐Designing

This research presents results from a study developing a smartphone app, UrbanCoBuilder, in which citizens can collaboratively create designs for urban environments usingaugmented reality technology and game mechanics. Eight prototypes were developed to refineselected design criteria, including tracking strategies, design elements, user experience and theinterface with game mechanics. The prototypes were developed through an iterative design processwith assessments and incremental improvements. The tracking was especially challenging andusing multiple bitonal markers combined with the smartphone’s gyroscope sensor to average theuser position was identified as the most suitable strategy. Still, portability and stability linked totracking need to be improved. Design elements, here building blocks with urban functions textures,were realistic enough to be recognizable and easy to understand for the users. Future studies willfocus on usability tests with larger user groups

The Urban CoCreation Lab—An Integrated Platform for Remote and Simultaneous Collaborative Urban Planning and Design through Web-Based Desktop 3D Modeling, Head-Mounted Virtual Reality and Mobile Augmented Reality: Prototyping a Minimum Viable Product and Developing Specifications for a Minimum Marketable Product

Both policy and research highlight the importance of diverse stakeholder input in urban development processes but visualizing future built environments and creating two-way design communication for non-expert stakeholders are challenging. The present study develops an intuitive and simplified 3D modeling platform that integrates web-based desktop, virtual reality and mobile augmented reality technologies for remote simultaneous urban design collaboration. Through iterative prototyping, based on two series of workshops with stakeholders, the study resulted in such an integrated platform as a minimum viable product as well as specifications for a minimum marketable product to be used in real projects. Further study is required to evaluate the minimum level of detail in the 3D modeling necessary for good perception of scale and environmental impact simulation

The Urban CoBuilder – A mobile augmented reality tool for crowd-sourced simulation of emergent urban development patterns: Requirements, prototyping and assessment

Policy and research argue for multi-stakeholder inclusion in design and planning to increase urban qualities and resilience. Communicative planning and agent-based modelling are two approaches facilitating such inclusion, but both have shortcomings. In this paper, a third complementary approach is explored: rule-based emergent planning supported through mobile augmented reality (MAR) and gamification. Such an approach would serve to crowdsource data on how people collectively build their city under different types of planning rules, mimicking emergent development patterns but, currently, there is a lack of functioning participative outdoor MAR tools. The objectives of this paper are to a) identify a set of specifications detailing the necessary performance of a MAR tool; b) describe the development of a prototype MAR tool; and c) assess this prototype MAR tool through pilot application. A literature review was carried out to identify tool requirements. An iterative research by design approach was applied to turn these specifications into a functioning MAR tool: the Urban CoBuilder. The tool was then piloted in a series of tests. The findings suggest that the MAR tool makes it possible for multiple stakeholders to design urban environments on site and that crowdsourced data on collective results of individual design and planning decisions can be gathered. Although the immersive qualities of the Urban CoBuilder were highly appreciated, further development is needed. The realism of planning rules, building types and functions has to be strengthened, the techniques for positioning the MAR model in relation to real space need improvement, and the gaming mechanisms should be enhanced to make gameplay attractive for a large number of stakeholders

CO-MAPPING: The Sustainable Compact and Green City

The 2011 Report from the Swedish Research Council FORMAS on Urban Sustainable Development, points toward a current knowledge gap in understanding the connections between citizen and the built environment. According to the report, there is an unquestioned link between built environment and living conditions by which man, by acting in and appropriating the built environment, is also its co\uadcreator. One of the major concerns in current urban planning and structuring of urban planning policies, deals with lack of understanding the perception of the built environment, including the citizens perspective, and the communication gap with experts resulting from this. To create a built environment that satisfies the citizen’s role, we have to first understand who the citizen is based on their location, and how they perceive and want to inhabit their urban space. The authors’ focus of research lies in investigating the citizen’s/user’s perception of the the built environment within a variety of urban typologies in order to identify its creative potentials, such as urban green potentials and sustainable compact mixed city.The paper examines this new design process of ‘co-mapping’, which the authors have identified as a co-creative methodology to sustainable urban development. The methodology focuses on the feasibility of using a collaborative mapping application on a hand-held communications device as a comprehensive survey tool for categorically ‘mapping’ user-perceptions on urban conditions. The evaluation and testing of the methods takes place through a series of workshops around themes of ‘Urban Green Potential’ and ‘Compact Mixed City’. The Co-Mapping\ua9 application, designed by the authors with trans-disciplinary efforts with GIS specialists and software designers, utilizes the accessibility of smartphones and diverse geo-technology to create a versatile survey mapping system. The web-based real-time visualization strategies of the output data are employed for efficient dissemination of information as a two-way communications tool