Vertical urbanisation is perceived as necessary to accommodate a growing population but is associated with severe risks for human well-being. It requires a profound understanding of how archi-tectural designs can ensure visually readable and liveable environments before it has been built. How-ever, current digital representation techniques fail to address the diverse interests of non-experts. Emerging biometric technologies may deliver the missing user information to involve (future) inhabit-ants at different stages of the planning process. The study aims to gain insight into how non-experts (visually) experience 3D city visualizations of designed urban areas. In two laboratory studies, univer-sity students were randomly assigned to view a set of the same level of detail images from one of two planned urban area developments in the Netherlands. Using eye-tracking technology, the visual behav-iour metrics of fixation count and duration and general eye-movement patterns were recorded for each image, followed by a short survey. The results show how visual behaviour and perception are remark-ably similar across different detail levels, implying that 3D visualizations of planned urban develop-ments can be examined by non-experts much earlier in the design process than previously thought.
DOCUMENT
The 3D Additivist Cookbook, devised and edited by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, is a free compendium of imaginative, provocative works from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists. The 3D Additivist Cookbook contains .obj and .stl files for the 3D printer, as well as critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times.
MULTIFILE
Natural disasters are a growing concern around the globe. In the Netherlands, water has always played an important role as both friend and enemy. To quickly analyze and visualise possible disaster outcomes has been really difficult. In collaboration with engineering company Tauw we improved this modellingwith an interdisciplinary team of GIS experts, High performance computing and real time visualisation. In a pilot for the city center of Groningen we developed a 3D version of flooding landscape maps (RUG, 2014) after modelling extreme rainfall. With a flooding landscape map you can see at a glance where water isgoing and where problem areas arise in case of extreme rainfall. Any municipality or county can thus quickly determine which measures are to be taken to prevent for example disruption to traffic or flooding damage tobuildings.
DOCUMENT
In urban planning, 3D modeling and virtual reality (VR) provide new means for involving citizens in the planning process. For municipal government, it is essential to know how effective these means are, to justify investments. In this study, we present a case of using VR in a municipal process of civic participation concerning the redesign of a public park. The process included codesign activities and involved citizens in decision-making through a ballot, using 3D-rendered versions of competing designs. In codesign, 3D-modeling tools were instrumental in empowering citizens to negotiate design decisions, to discuss the quality of designs with experts, and to collectively take decisions. This paper demonstrates that, in a ballot on competing designs with 1302 citizens, VR headsets proved to be equally effective compared to other display technologies in informing citizens during decision making. The results of an additional, controlled experiment indicate that VR headsets provide higher engagement and more vivid memories than viewing the designs on non-immersive displays. By integrating research into a municipal process, we contribute evidence of cognitive and engagement effects of using 3D modeling and immersive VR technologies to empower citizens in participatory urban planning. The case described in the paper concerns a public park; a similar approach could be applied to the design of public installations including media architecture.
DOCUMENT
In her inaugural lecture, Sabine Niederer presents visual methodologies that take into account the contemporary state of digital images and demonstrates how visualizations may be put to use for collaborative research.
DOCUMENT
Cahier #3 explores a series of concrete hackable citymaking practices in Athens, São Paulo and Shenzhen. Despite being situated on different continents and having distinct traditions and political systems, we found a number of dynamics around civic initiatives in these cities that further informed our Hackable city model.
DOCUMENT
Over the last few years, the term “smart cities” has gained traction in academic, industry, and policy debates about the deployment of new media technologies in urban settings. It is mostly used to describe and market technologies that make city infrastructures more efficient, and personalize the experience of the city. Here, we want to propose the notion of “ownership” as a lens to take an alternative look at the role of urban new media in the city. With the notion of ownership, we seek to investigate how digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues to engage in co-creating the socialfabric and built form of the city. Taking ownership as the point of departure, we wish to broaden the debate about the role of new media technologies in urban design from an infrastructural to a social point of view, or from “city management” to “city making”.
MULTIFILE
This chapter takes a closer look at the case of Amsterdam as a particular manifestation of a film festival city. Drawing from a new dataset on festivals in the Netherlands, the data supports the view of film festivals as a highly dynamic cultural sector: Internationally acclaimed film festivals exist beside smaller festivals that are more community bound; new festivals emerge annually, and young festivals struggle to survive the three-to-five-year mark.Amsterdam holds a unique position in the Dutch film festival landscape as a third of all film festivals in the Netherlands take place in the capital city. Our data collection helps to bring parts of the city’s film infrastructure to the forefront. On the one hand, Amsterdam’s top five locations for film festival events show clear creative cities logic: The data shows just how powerful the pull of such locations is. On the other hand, we find evidence of placemaking and livable city strategies: Amsterdam’s film festivals extend into the capillaries of the city.Dedicated festival datasets may cast new perspectives on local or national festival landscapes, by revealing patterns that remain hidden in qualitative and case-study based projects. But there are also challenges to address in data-driven research on festival cultures, we name a few such as categorization of data. We conclude that such challenges can be more easily faced if more datasets, of for instance, other cities, are pursued and become available.
MULTIFILE
