Urban Objects Research Articles

DATA INTEGRATION OF DIFFERENT DOMAINS IN GEO-INFORMATION MANAGEMENT: A RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE CASE STUDY

Abstract. A 3D city model is a representation of an urban environment with a three-dimensional geometry of common urban objects and structures, with buildings as the most prominent feature. In the last decades, 3D city models appear to have been predominantly used for visualisation; however, nowadays they are being increasingly employed in a number of domains and for a broad range of tasks beyond visualisation. The MUIF (Modello Unico dell’Infrastruttura Fisica) project, here illustrated as a case study, refers to the implementation of a single spatial model of the infrastructure of Italy’s railway system (RFI). The authors describe preliminary results and the critical aspects of the study they are carrying out, explaining the processes and methodology to model all datasets into a single integrated spatial model as the reference base for future continuously updates. The case study refers to data collected by different sources and at various resolutions. An integrated spatial Database has been used for modelling topographic 3D objects, traditionally implemented in a 3D city model, as well as other specific 3D objects, related to the railway infrastructure that, usually, aren’t modelled in a 3D city model, following the same methodology as the first ones.

Personal Freedom and Identity Representation Performance in Modern Urban Subculture

Conglomerations of modern cities are becoming increasingly fractional/disintegrated. An urban person turns into a special type of a person called “homo urbis”, capable of living in a "stone jungle" of performance, in a dense concentration of urban culture objects and amongst the most heterogeneous human mass. The modern civilizational paradigm predetermines the dynamics of the processes of socio-cultural personal identity formation performance in urban culture environment, as well as its globalization and glocalization. The very phenomenon of personal identity in modern urban culture falls into the spectrum of multiple "identities", its evolutionary and critical performance processes. All socio-cultural and civilizational interactions of urban cultural environment are mixed up in existential contradictions. Clear and distinct bases of the traditional world are giving way to civilizationally complex chaos, diverse cultural multilayer and their intricate interlacement. The coexistence of numerous axiological patterns, stereotypes, narratives and metanarratives of the city result in colossal ideological and spiritual tension, where a person has been considered the core of the concentration of the crisis problems since the Socratic anthropological turn. In this connection, the problem of determination and creation of an urban personality, by all means, should be supplemented with the most important heuristic and ontological component – the search for personal identity, as the correlation of the ever-forming civilizational mass of existence with the process of self-reflection of an individual.

Conceptual Approach to Management of the Urban Environment Objects Reproduction

The article deals with the urban environment key aspects and the fixed assets reproduction on the system level, analyses the results achieved in the course of the state policy, proposes a conceptual model for the urban environment objects expanded the reproduction management.

Recreational and Touristic Activity, Forming Poltava Region in the Territory Branding Context

The analysis of factors of branding of territories that is the driving force for the development of the recreational and tourist system of the Poltava region is carried out. The approaches used by the regions to create their brand strategy are analyzed. Regardless of the specific objectives, successful brand strategy strategies of territories characterized by a common partner approach have been researched. As a result of the analysis of the structure of urban planning, to identify common factors that affect both the design of urban development objects and the design of the brand territory. It is concluded that the urban construction concept is the starting impulse of the territorial branding strategy. The types of potentially attractive resources for economic development and increase of attractiveness of the region are determined. The given classification is a religious tourism based on a rather developed network of religious buildings, most of which are architectural monuments, as one of the most important at the present stage of the development of tourist infrastructure in the Poltava region. On the example of organizing a regional network of religious tourism, the feasibility of using it to increase the investment attractiveness of the region has been proved.

Morphology Dependent Assessment of Resilience for Urban Areas

The formation of new threats and the increasing complexity of urban built infrastructures underline the need for more robust and sustainable systems, which are able to cope with adverse events. Achieving sustainability requires the strengthening of resilience. Currently, a comprehensive approach for the quantification of resilience of urban infrastructure is missing. Within this paper, a new generalized mathematical framework is presented. A clear definition of terms and their interaction builds the basis of this resilience assessment scheme. Classical risk-based as well as additional components are aligned along the timeline before, during and after disruptive events, to quantify the susceptibility, the vulnerability and the response and recovery behavior of complex systems for multiple threat scenarios. The approach allows the evaluation of complete urban surroundings and enables a quantitative comparison with other development plans or cities. A comprehensive resilience framework should cover at least preparation, prevention, protection, response and recovery. The presented approach determines respective indicators and provides decision support, which enhancement measures are more effective. Hence, the framework quantifies for instance, if it is better to avoid a hazardous event or to tolerate an event with an increased robustness. An application example is given to assess different urban forms, i.e., morphologies, with consideration of multiple adverse events, like terrorist attacks or earthquakes, and multiple buildings. Each urban object includes a certain number of attributes, like the object use, the construction type, the time-dependent number of persons and the value, to derive different performance targets. The assessment results in the identification of weak spots with respect to single resilience indicators. Based on the generalized mathematical formulation and suitable combination of indicators, this approach can quantify the resilience of urban morphologies, independent of possible single threat types and threat locations.

The Duplicitous Nature of the Familiar Urban Object: the Shopping Cart at Bennett’s Food Market, Where Food Buying is Most Satisfactory

When Sylvan Goldman invented the first shopping cart in the 1930s, it is unlikely he envisioned its eventual entrance into the rivers and swamps. Though advertised as a solution for the arm-weary shopper, the function was no doubt two-fold in truth: while the explicit function of the shopping cart was to ease the load for supermarket shoppers, the more implicit function was to ease them into buying more. However, the customers at Bennett’s Food Market in Kingston, Ontario – at the corner of Charles and Bagot through the early 1900s to the early 2000s – helped to turn those expectations upside down. Through an extensive collection of oral history interviews, The Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project has catalogued the neighbourhoods’ long-standing relationship with carts, but also the long-standing relationship with the grocery store that provided them. By focusing in on what first appears as a familiar urban object and considering it specifically in the context of Bennett’s Food Market, the shopping cart is revealed as far more than a basket on wheels. Shopping carts can nurture people not just by being filled up with food that’s then bought and consumed, and they can support a weight that’s not just of groceries, but that’s human.

Social and Physical Characterization of Urban Contexts: Techniques and Methods for Quantification, Classification and Purposive Sampling

Robust quantitative descriptions of the social and physical characteristics of urban contexts are essential for assessing the impacts of urban environments on other, potentially dependent variables. Common methodologies used for that purpose, however, are either coarse or suffer from biasing effects. At the social level, the use of indicators encoded into pre-defined areal units, makes results prone to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. At the physical level, the adopted morphological indicators are usually highly aggregated descriptors of urban form. Moreover, there is a lack of explicit methodologies for the purposive sampling of urban contexts with specific combinations of social and physical characteristics, which—we argue—may be more effective than probabilistic sampling, when exploring phenomena as elusive as the effects of urban contextual factors. This article presents a set of GIS-based methods for addressing these issues, based on: a) local indicators of spatial association; b) detailed quantitative morphological descriptions, coupled with unsupervised classification techniques; and c) purposive sampling strategies carried out on the data generated by the proposed context characterization methods (a and b). The methods are illustrated through the characterization of the urban contexts of the 77 state-sector secondary schools in Liverpool, but are generalizable across all categories of urban objects and are independent of the geographical context of implementation.

Architectural heritage semantic 3D documentation in multi-scale standard maps

Abstract The documentation of cultural heritage is acknowledged as a fundamental instrument to guarantee the monument preservation and promotion, and to educate people towards these aims. The recently evolved potentialities of information technologies and communication (standard data models, ontologies and formats, web technologies) permit the development of digital archives in which the information is also semantically specified in a shared and explicit way, so that it can be universally understood and correctly interpreted. However, some tools are missing for suitably archiving and communicating the architectural heritage information, including the representation potentialities of high-level-of-detail 3D models. A goal of this study is the suitable representation of both the thematic information about architectural heritage and its 3D geometric characteristics in an interoperable and understandable way. For this reason, the existing data models, available for the geometric and cartographic field, and for the cultural heritage domain, were considered. They are distinct standards, and some limits make them incomplete (in the spatial or semantic management). In this study, an extension is proposed of the standard data model CityGML to overcome these limits. CityGML is published by the Open Geospatial Consortium to represent urban objects and permits a multi-scale management of the information useful for the representation of architectural heritage multi-faceted, multi-temporal, complex knowledge. In the paper, the extension is described, and an example of its application on a portion of a highly detailed 3D model of a mediaeval church is presented.

Multiscale Geoscene Segmentation for Extracting Urban Functional Zones from VHR Satellite Images

Urban functional zones, such as commercial, residential, and industrial zones, are basic units of urban planning, and play an important role in monitoring urbanization. However, historical functional-zone maps are rarely available for cities in developing countries, as traditional urban investigations focus on geographic objects rather than functional zones. Recent studies have sought to extract functional zones automatically from very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite images, and they mainly concentrate on classification techniques, but ignore zone segmentation which delineates functional-zone boundaries and is fundamental to functional-zone analysis. To resolve the issue, this study presents a novel segmentation method, geoscene segmentation, which can identify functional zones at multiple scales by aggregating diverse urban objects considering their features and spatial patterns. In experiments, we applied this method to three Chinese cities—Beijing, Putian, and Zhuhai—and generated detailed functional-zone maps with diverse functional categories. These experimental results indicate our method effectively delineates urban functional zones with VHR imagery; different categories of functional zones extracted by using different scale parameters; and spatial patterns that are more important than the features of individual objects in extracting functional zones. Accordingly, the presented multiscale geoscene segmentation method is important for urban-functional-zone analysis, and can provide valuable data for city planners.

An Object Similarity-Based Thresholding Method for Urban Area Mapping from Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day/Night Band (VIIRS DNB) Data

Nighttime light data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) provides a unique data source for mapping and monitoring urban areas at regional and global scales. This study proposes an object similarity-based thresholding method using VIIRS DNB data to map urban areas. The threshold for a target potential urban object was determined by comparing its similarity with all reference urban objects with known optimal thresholds derived from Landsat data. The proposed method includes four major steps: potential urban object generation, threshold optimization for reference urban objects, object similarity comparison, and urban area mapping. The proposed method was evaluated using VIIRS DNB data of China and compared with existing mapping methods in terms of threshold estimation and urban area mapping. The results indicated that the proposed method estimated thresholds and mapped urban areas accurately and generally performed better than the cluster-based logistic regression method. The correlation coefficients between the estimated thresholds and the reference thresholds were 0.9201–0.9409 (using Euclidean distance as similarity measure) and 0.9461–0.9523 (using Mahalanobis distance as similarity measure) for the proposed method and 0.9435–0.9503 for the logistic regression method. The average Kappa Coefficients of the urban area maps were 0.58 (Euclidean distance) and 0.57 (Mahalanobis distance) for the proposed method and 0.51 for the logistic regression method. The proposed method shows potential to map urban areas at a regional scale effectively in an economic and convenient way.

LiDAR Point Clouds to 3-D Urban Models$:$ A Review

Three-dimensional (3-D) urban models are an integral part of numerous applications, such as urban planning and performance simulation, mapping and visualization, emergency response training and entertainment, among others. We consolidate various algorithms proposed for reconstructing 3-D models of urban objects from point clouds. Urban models addressed in this review include buildings, vegetation, utilities such as roads or power lines and free-form architectures such as curved buildings or statues, all of which are ubiquitous in a typical urban scenario. While urban modeling, building reconstruction, in particular, clearly demand specific traits in the models, such as regularity, symmetry, and repetition; most of the traditional and state-of-the-art 3-D reconstruction algorithms are designed to address very generic objects of arbitrary shapes and topology. The recent efforts in the urban reconstruction arena, however, strive to accommodate the various pressing needs of urban modeling. Strategically, urban modeling research nowadays focuses on the usage of specialized priors, such as global regularity, Manhattan-geometry or symmetry to aid the reconstruction, or efficient adaptation of existing reconstruction techniques to the urban modeling pipeline. Aimed at an in-depth exploration of further possibilities, we review the existing urban reconstruction algorithms, prevalent in computer graphics, computer vision and photogrammetry disciplines, evaluate their performance in the architectural modeling context, and discuss the adaptability of generic mesh reconstruction techniques to the urban modeling pipeline. In the end, we suggest a few directions of research that may be adopted to close in the technology gaps.

Cartographic modeling for monitoring the technical condition of urban development objects

The paper presents the results of a study of the risk factors for the degradation of the urban ecosystem and their impact on the state of the objects of urban development. The purpose of the study was the development of a cartographic model for predicting the change in the technical condition of a town-planning facility, taking into account external factors. The relevance of the work is justified by the increase in the flow of failures of constructions and building systems, as well as the absence of a single system for diagnosing the risk of emergency situations. In the course of the study, the methods of mapping, structural analysis, the index method, and the method of expert assessments were used. The criterion for estimating the degree of influence of the operating environment on the exploited objects, which takes into account the quality of the medium and the decrease in the durability of the object, is proposed in this work. An example of the development of a forecast scale for the operating conditions of an object in the form of a matrix model is given in this paper. On the basis of the developed cartographic model, the cause-effect relationships between the intensity of failures on the exploited objects and the degree of degradation of the city's ecosystem were revealed. The model proposed by the authors can be the basis for adjusting the monitoring of technical condition, methods of protecting structures from destruction and optimizing the planning of preventive repairs.

Usable elements of technical infrastructure around historic architecture in the Old Town of Prague

Utilizable architectural details can highlight the character of a historical building, but they can also change the perception of the total view of this particular building or even the whole district. That is why architectural elements installed in old buildings or old, historical quarters are a challenge for designers and contractors. It is possible to achieve a good and well-accepted effect, but one condition must be abided - the investor must try to get all elements harmonized. The elaboration of a concept requires a good knowledge about both building history and detail character. The paper shows an application of engineering elements in the Old Town of Prague. The research was conducted in the historical part of Prague, where even on the first look you can see scrupulousness about all elements of buildings, the most useful elements related to urban networks and object furnishings are not incompatible with the historic character of the city. A widespread public debate on renovation of constructions, showing good and bad examples of retrofitting, would allow avoiding common mistakes and link modernity with historical value.

The visual-landscape analysis during the integration of high-rise buildings within the historic urban environment

The article is devoted to one of the types of urban planning studies - the visual-landscape analysis during the integration of high-rise buildings within the historic urban environment for the purposes of providing pre-design and design studies in terms of preserving the historical urban environment and the implementation of the reconstructional resource of the area. In the article formed and systematized the stages and methods of conducting the visual-landscape analysis taking into account the influence of high-rise buildings on objects of cultural heritage and valuable historical buildings of the city. Practical application of the visual-landscape analysis provides an opportunity to assess the influence of hypothetical location of high-rise buildings on the perception of a historically developed environment and optimal building parameters. The contents of the main stages in the conduct of the visual - landscape analysis and their key aspects, concerning the construction of predicted zones of visibility of the significant historically valuable urban development objects and hypothetically planned of the high-rise buildings are revealed. The obtained data are oriented to the successive development of the planning and typological structure of the city territory and preservation of the compositional influence of valuable fragments of the historical environment in the structure of the urban landscape. On their basis, an information database is formed to determine the permissible urban development parameters of the high-rise buildings for the preservation of the compositional integrity of the urban area.

ПРОСТОРОВІ ПЕРЕТВОРЕННЯ У ВЕЛИКОМУ ПОСТСОЦІАЛІСТИЧНОМУ МІСТІ: ПРИКЛАД ХАРКОВА

Kharkiv is a great post-socialist industrial city with a population of over 1 million. Owning large objects with different functional components (both industrial and social infrastructure, other municipal institutions), the big city in the early 90’s faced with the fact that there was no resource for their maintenance and development. Variable and unstable economic situation drowned in demand for many services. A situation of paralysis of the public space of the city has been created. Only with the beginning of privatization and commercialization processes, we can talk about the gradual filling of the created emptiness. Individual investors become the subjects of assessment and planning of the territory. And the urban space is the object of commercial activity. The new conditions have created opportunities for dialogue between the authorities, the city community and business. Disorder of these relationships has given the poor results of spatial transformations and modernization of territory in Ukrainian cities. An investor, focusing on profit, determined the place, form and function of a new object at its discretion, often changing the face of the city and the role of the territory. Our research is caused by the need in the study of spatial transformations and modernization processes in the great post-socialist city, which may be a prerequisite for further changes. Perhaps, Kharkiv is the best example of a post-socialist city for the study of spatial-functional transformations. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the processes of spatial transformation and modernization, as the prerequisites for further spatial-functional transformations in a big city of Kharkiv, based on discovered transformation elements and a core of modernization on the territory. Analysis of the objects we were investigated, allowed for us to see directions of the transformation of the urban territory, outline the spatial structure of the sites, identify possible functional changes in the space and his contemporary role in the urban environment. Investigation of two test sites in Kharkiv – “old centre” and social centre, revealed the difference in the processes of spatial transformation and modernization of urban objects in these parts of the city. It is not always possible to fix a completed transformation. It is important here to see the beginning of the change, to “snatch” the very tendency for a possible change, then to be able to predict the direction and its dynamics.

Post-Soviet residential neighbourhoods in two second-order Ukrainian cities: Factors and models of spatial transformation

Post-socialist urban transformation constitutes an important segment of the contemporary urban studies. In this paper we focused on transformation processes in two typical post-Soviet residential neighbourhoods, built in the period of mass construction in the second half of XX century and located in the Ukrainian cities of Vinnytsia and Kherson. Our goals were to reveal the spatial and temporal transformation patterns, to identify the factors of transformation, and to delineate certain transformation mechanisms and models. The assessment of morphological and functional changes of urban objects was carried out via field observation according to a specially developed methodology with the further comparison of results with urban planning documents reflecting the reality in the beginning of 1990s. Our findings permitted to identify key transformation processes (deindustrialization, commercialization, revitalization, functional diversification), to list a set of factors promoting more intense transformations, and to explain mechanisms defining existing spatial pattern of transformations within the test neighbourhoods. Private commercial activity, including rapid development of retail sector, was the main source of transformation, thus defining its partial, fragmented and somewhere controversial nature. Since the probability of further transformation in each point of the territory is determined by the already existing pattern, the existing heterogeneities tend to enhance with a lapse of time, and therefore the initial stages of transformation are especially important for the further development of the neighbourhood. Despite the similar starting conditions, two neighbourhoods demonstrated different outcomes in terms of modernization, explained by the differences in the urban spatial structure, spatial and sectorial structure of industrial zones, position (importance) of the neighbourhood in the whole city, as well as the economic dynamics of the city. Based on detected factors and mechanisms, we proposed models for further transformation intended to maximize the level of modernization within the entire test neighbourhoods.

The use of infrared photography for the study of thermal fields of urban agglomerations and objects on their territory

The article gives an overview of the infrared sensing usage for the study of urbanized landscapes’ temperature anomalies. Main parameters of orbital infrared sensing systems that allow the research of metropolitan areas heat zones are analyzed. Spatial resolution of space-based infrared sensing systems is discussed. It is also shown that space-based infrared sensing allows to highlight landscape structures with heightened temperature and detect temperature contrast between city territories and nearby suburban areas. Examples of Ukraine’s big cities infrared remote sensing are provided for Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnipro. It is shown that each city has its own temperature contrast features. Attention is drawn to anthropogenic origin of thermal emissions of urbanized landscapes’ structures.

Comprehensive investigation on non-parametric classification methods in order to separate urban objects using the integration of very high spatial resolution LiDAR and aerial data

Comprehensive investigation on non-parametric classification methods in order to separate urban objects using the integration of very high spatial resolution LiDAR and aerial data

SPATIO-SEMANTIC COMPARISON OF LARGE 3D CITY MODELS IN CITYGML USING A GRAPH DATABASE

Abstract. A city may have multiple CityGML documents recorded at different times or surveyed by different users. To analyse the city’s evolution over a given period of time, as well as to update or edit the city model without negating modifications made by other users, it is of utmost importance to first compare, detect and locate spatio-semantic changes between CityGML datasets. This is however difficult due to the fact that CityGML elements belong to a complex hierarchical structure containing multi-level deep associations, which can basically be considered as a graph. Moreover, CityGML allows multiple syntactic ways to define an object leading to syntactic ambiguities in the exchange format. Furthermore, CityGML is capable of including not only 3D urban objects’ graphical appearances but also their semantic properties. Since to date, no known algorithm is capable of detecting spatio-semantic changes in CityGML documents, a frequent approach is to replace the older models completely with the newer ones, which not only costs computational resources, but also loses track of collaborative and chronological changes. Thus, this research proposes an approach capable of comparing two arbitrarily large-sized CityGML documents on both semantic and geometric level. Detected deviations are then attached to their respective sources and can easily be retrieved on demand. As a result, updating a 3D city model using this approach is much more efficient as only real changes are committed. To achieve this, the research employs a graph database as the main data structure for storing and processing CityGML datasets in three major steps: mapping, matching and updating. The mapping process transforms input CityGML documents into respective graph representations. The matching process compares these graphs and attaches edit operations on the fly. Found changes can then be executed using the Web Feature Service (WFS), the standard interface for updating geographical features across the web.

Микроэлементный состав снежного покрова в окрестностях угольных и газовых котельных как показатель экологичности используемого топлива

Emissions of rural villages’ boiler houses remain insufficiently studied in comparison with emissions of big urban heat power engineering objects. In this paper have been presented the results of comparative analysis for a dust pollution level and trace element composition of solid particles in vicinity of rural villages’ boiler houses distinguishing by technological parameters and the fuel’s type (coal or gas) based on the snow cover’s trace element composition study. It has been established that the dust load value relating to background in vicinity of different coal-burning boiler houses is varying and depends on fuel consumption volumes, availability of dust and gas trapping system, coal depository and vehicle park. The dust load value does not exceeded background in vicinity of gas- burning boiler houses no matter of their technological parameters. It has been demonstrated that the trace elements accumulation level in the samples from vicinity of coal-burning and gas-burning boiler houses depends on type, composition and flow rates of fuel, as well as from the fly ash composition and local emissions sources. Have been marked general tracer elements (Hg, Zn, Ni, Mo, Co, Ba, Sr) and specific ones (Cd, As, Sb, Pb, V) of man-made impact for different coal-burning boiler houses. Hg, As, Cd have been proposed as general tracer elements of man-made impact for coal-burning boiler houses. It has been stated that natural gas is the most environmental friendliness fuel in comparison with coal regardless of boiler house’s technological parameters.