Tuesday, July 20, 2010

New Working Paper: From Buildings to Cities


Below is the the abstract for this paper:

The built environment is a significant factor in many urban processes, yet direct measures of built form are seldom used in geographical studies. Representation and analysis of urban form and function could provide new insights and improve the evidence base for research. So far progress has been slow due to limited data availability, computational demands, and a lack of methods to integrate built environment data with aggregate geographical analysis. Spatial data and computational improvements are overcoming some of these problems, but there remains a need for techniques to process and aggregate urban form data. Here we develop a Built Environment Model of urban function and dwelling type classifications for Greater London, based on detailed topographic and address-based data (sourced from Ordnance Survey MasterMap). The multi-scale approach allows the Built Environment Model to be viewed at fine-scales for local planning contexts, and at city-wide scales for aggregate geographical analysis, allowing an improved understanding of urban processes. This flexibility is illustrated in the two examples, that of urban function and residential type analysis, where both local-scale urban clustering and city-wide trends in density and agglomeration are shown. While we demonstrate the multi-scale Built Environment Model to be a viable approach, a number of accuracy issues are identified, including the limitations of 2D data, inaccuracies in commercial function data and problems with temporal attribution. These limitations currently restrict the more advanced applications of the Built Environment Model.


The full title of the paper and reference is:
Smith, D. A. and Crooks, A. T. (2010), From Buildings to Cities: Enabling the Multi-Scale Analysis of Urban Form and Function through the integration of Geographical and Geometric Methods. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London): Working Paper 155, London, England. (pdf)

Thursday, July 15, 2010

NetLogo GIS Examples from backspaces.net

While searching for some NetLogo GIS examples I came across this excellent web page by Owen Densmore from Backspaces.net called "NetLogo Bag of Tricks" showcasing NetLogo's GIS functionality. There is a model of water traffic in Venice model and a simple model that reads census data and extracts features,showing them in different colors (both of which can be downloaded).


If any readers know of any other good NetLogo models using GIS data please leave a comment pointing us in the direction of them.