Perceiving Fabric Immersed in Time, an Exploration of Urban Cognitive Capabilities of Neural Networks

Abstract

City develops gradually with the lapse of time. Cities, as a ‚container‚, are injected new urban elements along the trajectory of the times and the progress of human civilization, constructing the historical structures involved past, present and future. Thus, the cultural information of each era is preserved in the urban fabric together and urban fabric features are complex and rich, which are difficult to capture in traditional design methods. In this paper, we try to use Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), one of the neural network algorithms, to explore the inner rules of complex urban morphological features and realize the perception of the urban fabric. Neural networks are innovatively applied to the larger and more complex city generation in this experiment. First, we collect European urban fabric as the dataset, then label data to facilitate machine training, use GAN to learn the feature of the dataset by adjusting parameters, and analyze the effect of the generated results. The automatic feature learning capability of the neural networks is used to summarize the inherent patterns and rules in urban development which is difficult for human to discover.