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No more busywork! DRY up your NSString constants

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Preamble In the last few years, Objective-C has become enormously DRYer. For example: in the past, adding a property to a class meant adding several of: an ivar, a @property, a @synthesize, a getter/setter, and a release call in dealloc. Worse, renaming or deleting the property meant updating all these. This was error-prone busywork, and […]

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Uncategorized

London in time | A London’s Evolution Animation

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The Roman Road network 410AC, as a floating layer over contemporary London in 3D. 
How did London become what it is today? How did it evolve and why? It is widely known that London is a historical city. One that has been inhabited for over 1500 years. What most people don’t know however, is that the greatest preserved feature of the city, is the road network itself. Unlike other historical cities such as Athens or Rome where there is an obvious patchwork of areas of different periods, London’s scheduled sites and listed buildings are individual structures, in many cases assembled gradually by parts from many different periods. Those who tried to locate different historic structures will know that these features appear as pieces of different puzzles, scattered within the vast fabric of the contemporary city. What has been preserved, and what will we preserve in the future?

The London Evolution Animation (LEA) was developed by The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL), as a partnership project between English Heritage, The Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (University of Cambridge)/Dr Kiril Stanilov and Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) (with the Mapping London and Locating London’s Past projects), and was initiated and directed by Polly Hudson (PHD).

The London Evolution Animation for the first time, brings together and shows the historical development of London from Roman times to today, through the evolution of the road network and preserved structures of the built environment. The information is categorized by periods and the new road segments appear gradually over an image of the faded contemporary London. For each period, gradually enlarging yellow points highlight the position and number of statutorily protected buildings and structures. Datasets cover London’s 19,000 Listed Buildings and 156 Scheduled Monuments which are categorized by period (listed date) and integrated into the animation. LEA brings together datasets provided by English Heritage’s National Heritage List for England, MOLAS, University of Cambridge -Dr. Kiril Stanilov and Ordnance Survey. Originally, LEA was meant to be developed fully in 3D, which is an ongoing project.

The animation was part of the “Almost Lost” Exhibition and aims to create awareness of the importance of preservation of the city’s past and provide a reflection for the future. The exhibition included several digital exhibits from the Centre of Advanced Spatial Analysis, such as the popular Pigeon Sim and the Bloomsbury Augmented Reality Application, which allows visitors to view a 3D fully interactive model of the area’s historic periods, using their iPad.
A series of digital pictures showcase the what if scenarios of developments in London that were never realized, while 3D animations of London’s history of the built environment explain more about the city’s architectural heritage.

The exhibition is found online in Polly’s Hudson Almost Lost online and its a great showcase of London’s historic wealth. Further information on the Animation, a historical overview and on the production of the video can also be found in Polly’s Hudson website.

List of References:

A. Paolo Masucci, Kiril Stanilov and Michael Batty (2013) The growth of London’s street network in its dual representation http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa/publications/working-paper-189

CASA UCL: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa

MOLA: http://www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk/NewsProjects/Current-News/LondonEvolutionAnimation.htm

Cambridge: http://www-smartinfrastructure.eng.cam.ac.uk/

English Heritage: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/

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CASA, data visualization, london, Uncategorized, Visual Art

Multi-Agent Systems for Urban Planning

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Recently we contributed a chapter to “Technologies for Urban and Spatial Planning: Virtual Cities and Territories” which aims to quote from the preference:  

“(i) to contribute to the dissemination of the recent research and development of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in urban and spatial planning, trying to demonstrate their usability in planning processes through the presentation of relevant case studies, framed by their underlying theory; (ii) to give additional evidence to the fact that ICT are the privileged means to produce virtual cities and territories; and (iii) to make available, from a pedagogical standpoint, a group of illustrative reviews of the scientific production made by both academics and practitioners in the field.”

The book has 11 chapters which are grouped in several themes:

“first group focuses on the discussion over the use of ICT in spatial planning; the second group of contributions deals with urban modelling and simulation; the third group focuses on the use of different sensors to acquire information and model spatial processes; the fourth group focuses on the use of data to create more capable visualization tools; and the fifth group is about the use of virtual models to simulate real environments and plan and manage other aspects of the built environment such as energy.”

Our chapter is entitled “Multi-agent Systems for Urban Planning” fits into the second group with respect to urban modeling and simulation. We present a detailed overview about the theory and the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) in spatial planning, focusing on how MAS can lead to insights into urban problems and aid urban planning fostering a bottom up approach to spatial planning. The abstract is as follows:
Cities provide homes for over half of the world’s population, and this proportion is expected to increase throughout the next century. The growth of cities raises many questions and challenges for urban planning including which cities and regions are most likely to grow, what the pattern of urban growth will be, and how the existing infrastructure will cope with such growth. One way to explore these types of questions is through the use of multi-agent systems (MAS) that are capable of modeling how individuals interact and how structures emerge through such interactions, in terms of both the social and physical environment of cities. Within this chapter, the authors focus on how MAS can lead to insights into urban problems and aid urban planning from the bottom up. They review MAS models that explore the growth of cities and regions, models that explore land-use patterns resulting from such growth along with the rise of slums. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate how MAS models can be used to model transportation and the changing demographics of cities. Through these examples the authors also demonstrate how this style of modeling can give insights into such issues that cannot be gleamed from other modeling methodologies. The chapter concludes with challenges and future research directions of MAS models with respect to capturing the dynamics of human behavior in urban planning.

Full Reference:

Crooks, A.T., Patel, A. and Wise, S. (2014), Multi-agent Systems for Urban Planning, in Pinto, N.N., Tenedório, J. Antunes A. P. and Roca, J. (eds.), Technologies for Urban and Spatial Planning: Virtual Cities and Territories, IGI Global, Hershey, PA, pp. 29-56. (pdf)

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ABM, complexity, GIS, Multi-agent Systems
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