Earlier this week at the annual conference of the American Planning Association, I attended a very interesting session on GIS mapping of combined data sets. It was billed as a session on “mashups,” which I suppose the presenters thought…
Donovan Gillman‘s insight:
It should come as no surprise that most people in Egor are not happy – will this "fact"- i.e. that these areas are mapped, make any difference to the problems these people experience in their daily lives -or is this just another type of academic past time ?
Children living in Phumlani Village, Cape Town, South Africa have no safe place to play. Safe playgrounds help promote community and educational development.
Donovan Gillman‘s insight:
Maybe thers someone here in Cape Town whos preppared to sponsor this?
Wynwood é um bairro de Miami, até há algum tempo degradado, e agora totalmente revitalizado, com obras de street art dos mais famosos grafiteiros da cena internacional.
Hello all! Many of you have asked when I would come out with a drawing book. I am delighted to announce that after nine months of writing and another six of b…
Donovan Gillman‘s insight:
Freehand drawing is as neccessasary now as it ever was – digital photos, computers, 3d graphics might have the day in recording annd rendering , but ideas and feelings and images of place are more readily encoded in us when we record them in in sketches – our observatiosn in allsenses are enriched by them.
Stoss Leads Design Team Selected for Movement on Main
The winning design proposal takes a broad understanding of health, one in which physical, psychological, social, environmental and public health are all intertwined and can contribute to an enhanced sense of community. Light‐Play! addresses all of this, in a concentrated and fun streetscape that beckons people to interact, to move, to engage
Donovan Gillman‘s insight:
Chris Reed’s Stoss again an inspiratoinal design and different view of what streets can be.
Just before my CityEngine month trial ends, I spent a couple of days of exploring CityEngine, I was able to create a set of simple models and export them through into Unity 3D.
Initially I took a export of xml data from OpenStreetMap of an area around the UCL campus. This was then fed into CityEngine using the import tool available specifically for OSM data.
Then manipulating the various tools in CityEngine you can create models by defining rules for the blocks of building outlines. I used some simple presets and the result was this:
By selecting the various building models, they were exported out into FBX format which can be read into Unity 3D, the textures however had to be reconfigured and set in Unity. Then importing the Constructor asset we get an avatar to explore the simple 3D space created.
As most readers are likely to know, “LEED” (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a voluntary set of standards for judging and certifying green buildings. It was developed by the US Green Building Council, a consortium of industry…
Donovan Gillman‘s insight:
The problems of Green Building Rating systems, with buildings that are rated on their own, is that the context and location of the site are not taken sufficiently into account – the same problem exists with the South African Green Star rating, where a high star rating can be given to a large building that is located in an urban situation where it ignores the street-level environment and turns its back on the city and people who must pass by it, and even discourages use of its plazas and pavements to avoid vagrants and undersirables, as it is focused on car driving office occupants whose daily commute form the suburbs further increase congestion and CO2 emissions on the overcrowded roads of the city which still has inadequate and unsafe public transport.
This is not to say these rating systems are of no value, but rather that they need further refinement and tailoring – maybe one size doesn’t fit all and a more locally based process of sustainability evaluation would benefit the urban fabric and all its actors – not just the developers and property owners.
Exploring how we create an enhanced user experience in leisure, retail, urban and landscape environments and collaborate together to build our common future
