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Sustainability and protection of the environment are requirements of high priority in our society. These tasks need an efficient monitoring of the environment. The information gathered should be accurate and up-to-date for all kinds of decision making, planning, simulation and analysis. All environmental information systems are data-hungry and once established require continuous maintenance to keep track of changes in the physical environment. The built-environment is obviously one of the most interesting areas, with regular changes and constant need for updated information. An out-of-date database is arguably worse than having no database because of the false sense of certainty it carries. If there is no database, model etc. then at least users are aware of their lack of information and cannot rely on inaccurate data. In the context of these topics we are using the term ‘environment’ to denote the urban physical structures. We do not regard in this chapter applications related to the physical environment as it expresses itself in terms of different forms of pollution, e.g. noise, emissions, etc. Examples for those are given in several of the other chapters. We regard those applications as potential users of geo-spatial information on the built-up area of a city.

ÖZET Günümüzün en belirgin özelliği, teknolojinin, insanın kavramakta zorlandığı değişim hızıdır. Bireyden başlayarak bütün ilişkiler etkilenip dönüşmekte ve yeni ilişkiler tanımlanmaktadır. Bu noktadan hareketle, çalışmada yeni teknolojiler-kent ilişkisi ele alınmıştır. Sözü edilen teknolojik değişim, 1970'lerden bu yana, kapitalizmin yeniden yapılanması temelinde yaşanmaktadır. Bu süreç içerisinde, kentler de bir dönüşüm yaşamaktadır. Kentlerin rolleri farklılaşmış ve ilişkileri yeniden tanımlanmıştır. Bunun yam sıra, kentsel örüntüde önemli değişimler gözlemlenmektedir. Merkezin yemden yapılanması ve merkezsizleşme, kentin sınırlan ötesine yayılması bu değişimin iki yönünü oluşturur. Enformasyon ve iletişim ağlan, kentsel değişimde bir faktör ve aynı zamanda bireyin gündelik yaşamına yeni bir girdidir. Çalışmanın iki ana alanını, sibermekan olarak adlandınlan enformasyon ve iletişim ağlan toplamı ve sibermekan tartışmasından üretilen sanal kent olgusu ile kentsel değişim oluşturmaktadır. Çalışmanın amacı, teknolojik gelişmeler ışığında yaşamlan ve yaşanılması olası değişimin tanımlanmasıdır. Yöntemi ise, konuyla ilgili tartışmaları, sorgulama temelinde aktarmaktır. Sonuçta vanlmak istenilen nokta geleceğe ilişki öngörülerde bulunmak değil, kentsel duruma anlık bir bakıştır. m SUMMARY One of the most evident feature of the last two decade is the rapid change of technology. This process is so fast that human cannot adjust himself to the situation easily. Due to this, developments, the aim of this thesis is to search the relationship of the new technology and the city. The technological changes mentioned above is a part of the process of capitalist restructuring beginning from 1970s. Cities are also in transition within this process. Roles of the cities have differentiated and their relations are redefined. Besides this, significant shifts are observed in urban pattern. Restructuring of city centers and decentered developments, an urban sprawl are components of this shift. Enformation and communication networks are both a factor of this change and a new means in the daily life. Two main parts of this thesis is; networks called cyberspace, virtual city phenomen produced related with cyberspace and cities in transition. The aim is to define the changes that are taking place and the potantial changes related with technological developments. The method is, to present the arguments about this topic and the evaluation of the situation. IV 75

In this paper, we are concerned with modeling and generation of the moving crowd in a three dimensional virtual city to increase reality. In the virtual city, the habitants are usually controlled by some strict rules. To actualize more natural atmosphere, many data and rules are needed. In such case, we can easily control the shape of the crowd by using the characteristics of chaos. Although random numbers are often applied to such purposes, it is difficult to create and control such patterns. We constructed the models of the crowd in the street and the folk dance. The prototype system was developed for evaluation and it was confirmed that users felt easy to generate and control the crowd.

Spatial orientation is an important ability, which should be facilitated in geometry courses of elementary schools. A preferred approach (in Germany) typically involves navigation and orientation tasks with pictures of a town and city maps depicted in a book. Because of increasing use of computer systems in schools, it is very interesting to explore the value a virtual environment possesses for teaching spatial orientation. This articel describes the 'City Game', a computer-generated, virtual 3D city, developed for teaching spatial orientation in elementary schools, and an informal study to see first reactions of children and adults when using the 'City Game'.

This paper describes our experiments with narrative structure in nonlinear, interactive and networked forms of media. Through these explorations, we have begun to anticipate what types of tools will be useful to tell stories in multi-user 3D immersive environments incorporating synthetic actors.

Article discusses about the design and implementation of procedural content generation using java, especially the generation of virtual city. It is applied by using L-System to generate the elements of the city and also using some images as the base models. This method is proven to be more effective because it can produce almost unlimited variations of city in short amount of time without any needs to modify the application. The result of this application is a road map which can be used in many areas such as virtual reality, games, or other related purposes.

with the expansion and utilization of underground space resource in cities, the intensity and density of urban underground pipelines are dramatically increasing. How to efficiently utilize the up-to-date technology and realize underground space resources’ management, visualization, assistant design and mine applications, are hot issues in the current virtual city development. In this paper, we present a framework for Urban Underground Pipeline Assistant Design System (UUPADS) based on 3D virtual city by secondary development. UUPADS is designed for organizing and managing the information of underground pipeline efficiently. It includes the functions such as 3D virtual city platform building, 3D pipeline dynamic visualization, pipeline editing and assistant analysis, etc. The land-ground data, such as remote sensing image, Digital Elevation Models (DEM), roads and 3D house, etc. are integrated and managed by 3D virtual city platform. The underground 3D pipeline visualization is implemented with the location reference to the land-ground data and assistant analysis is realized. Taken one region of Jilin province as research data, UUPADS is feasible in conducting 3D pipeline interactive management more efficiency and convenience.

While raising questions about the position of the city in anthropological practice, much of the existing discourse has failed to acknowledge that there is a new kind of city out there, the virtual city. However, while the virtual city as a general analytical category may richly fulfil its function as a focal point for cultural meanings, this role may also be problematic, as revealed by my own fieldsite, Cybercity [1]. Against a background that boasts the absence of a shared history of meaning, a new virtual community has been constructed in which human relationships appear to be organised more perfectly than in everyday life. Within this city, being a good citizen is organised around discourses of harmony and unity. This in turn leads to questions about the enforcement of community ideals articulated through the control of both images and texts within the virtual city. By addressing these issues, my aim is not to represent some new model of the city. Rather, it is an attempt to stimulate discussion that will allow a movement towards new models of cities that are central to anthropological practices.

In this essay, I contemplate the role of video gamer as flâneur in Lost Angeles, a three-hour video work by Lee Tusman that captures the wanderings of gamer Derm McGuigan within the virtual world of Los Santos. With the help of Lena Hammergren’s “The re-turn of the flâneuse” I will consider how the video, originally conceived of as a project of “virtual flânerie,” might fall more accurately under the domain of the flâneuse, who uses the kinesthetic as a way to enter previously inaccessible spaces. As McGuigan moves his avatar through Los Santos, he integrates stimuli from the game with his own physical memories, indexing a series of other places and times as he goes. Lost Angeles also complicates the concept of the flâneuse through the presence of the avatar, who serves as the primary mode of navigation, but also offers kinesthetic information to the player. These relationships become more intricately entangled with the entrance of an additional set of spectators that watch McGuigan and his avatar via a live stream. Through this aggregation of wanderers, the flâneuse becomes unstable and multiplies, producing numerous other embodied relationships with the city of Los Santos and the body of the avatar [Which begs the question: Who and where is the flâneuse?] In this essay, I hope to demonstrate how, the proposal of Lost Angeles (to broadcast the wanderings of an expert gamer in a virtual space) collides with the structure of Grand Theft Auto (which invites the player into an ambiguous inside-and-outside location within Los Santos) and produces not one flâneur, but numerous flâneuses who traverse the virtual city via kinesthetic association with the avatar’s movements.

Urban planning is a complex decision-making process involving a large number of actors who interact intensively. Such groups often have conflicting expectations and backgrounds. Therefore, consultation and interaction is vital for the success of urban projects. A Geo-Virtual Environment (geoVE) can play an important role as a communication tool in the field of spatial planning, but such tools are still in limited use. We investigate the requirements for visualization in urban planning by analyzing user perceptions of visual materials and their needs for interaction in the different urban phases. The study is completed with the cooperation of several large municipalities in the Netherlands.

This paper introduces an integrated transportation and energy activity-based model (iTEAM), a tool for the evaluation of “green policies” aimed at enhancing sustainability and well-being. The model will simulate individual/household and organization/firm agents at a micro level. The aggregate simulation results will help forecast the impacts of policies on transport system efficiency and land-use dynamics in the simulated areas. This process is complemented by Material Flow Accounting (MFA) techniques, which account for a range of factors including wellbeing, waste production, and carbon emissions to calculate the urban metabolism.

In order to display huge scenes with virtual human inhabitants evolving inside a virtual city, we propose a methodology to create and manage different levels of detail for a well-segmented scene without "re-meshing" the scene during simulation. A database dedicated to urban life simulation providing data for planning human actions and behaviour is completed in such a way to furnish also information about the most adapted displayed representation. In this paper we propose a methodology for scene modelling. The scene is analysed and completed in order to create a database containing information needed for urban life simulation. Designers need and create rules for scene creation and some tools for database visualisation and manipulation are presented

The paper presents the development of an experimental Web-based design environment called Townscaping to be used at the conceptual stage of architectural and urban design. Inspired by Gordon Cullen’s seminal work on Townscape (1960’s–1970’s), the idea of Townscaping is to explore how 3D digital sketch design tools could be developed to operate in connection with a dynamic virtual city system under a user’s direct control. A prototype of Townscaping has been designed and implemented on the basis of an existing dynamic virtual city system. In Townscaping, a set of tools is provided for users to create and edit 3D graphic elements to be positioned directly onto the user-specified virtual city models. One of the key features of Townscaping is to enable sketching while navigation: designers can perform sketch design and gain immediate visual feedback while navigating the 3D virtual city models to any viewpoint at any moment. The current study suggests that it is feasible for virtual city models to serve as interactive urban contexts for 3D sketch design. Townscaping is considered primarily a research platform with which we are interested in investigating if designers’ engaging in 3D space conceptions may be enhanced through interacting and sketching with virtual townscapes.