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Urban water spaces, lakes and rivers have played a key role\ud in socio-economic and spatial development of cities throughout centuries.\ud There is an increasing trend in creating floating neighbourhoods\ud and spaces on water worldwide. Design of floating urban spaces is complex;\ud it requires incorporation of advanced computational tools to ensure\ud correct interpretation of environmental conditions to make proper\ud design decisions. In this study, we focus on an investigation of possibilities\ud of floating neighbourhoods to adapt according to rapid changes\ud of environments and demands of their end-users to address deeper engaging\ud of non-experts in the decision and design processes. In so doing,\ud we proposed modular assemblies as a floating neighbourhood, designed\ud and tested computationally using advanced modelling techniques to address\ud potentials of floating systems to grow and create formations in\ud waterfront cities. In this paper we tested 2 possible spatial developments\ud of floating configurations in order to understand non-experts’\ud preferences captured from an in-house developed computational model\ud in comparison with designer’s digital assembly strategies to deliver various\ud emergent complex scenarios of urban development. more...

Despite ubiquitous urbanization and worldwide standardization, there is a lack of better differentiation between cities towards more customized environments. Although current advancements in computational design and digital fabrication technologies have been successfully applied in various architectural scales, they have rarely, if ever, been implemented in a larger urban context that can lead to broader benefit and responses for citizens. This research aims to describe the potential of digital fabrication methods for large-scale urban applications that can subsequently lead to more diverse and unique urban environments. This paper summarizes state-of-the-art principles for large-scale building construction that have been implemented in the past, along with current research and practice, and outlines a conceptual framework for possible future directions for large quantities of automatic and bespoke construction deliveries for future customized urban scenarios. This article also outlines the effects of end-users’ participation on urban developments using online users’ interface to inform building processes. To address aspects of end-users’ engagement in customization of cities, the article elaborates the question of responsiveness, where the citizen actively interacts with the environment and building technology and vice versa in order to customize the urban space. This is theoretically and conceptually explained and illustrated in a case study related to the formerly industrial harbor area of Tanjong Pagar in the city of Singapore, which is a test-bed for new urban developments on 325 ha of waterfront land in the downtown port area within the context of a tropical city., Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 6 (1), ISSN:2297-2668 more...

The identity of an urban environment is important because it contributes to self-identity, a sense of community, and a sense of place. However, under present-day conditions, the identities of expanding cities are rapidly deteriorating and vanishing, especially in the case of Asian cities. Therefore, cities need to build their urban identity, which includes the past and points to the future. At the same time, cities need to add new features to improve their livability, sustainability, and resilience. In this paper, using data mining technologies for various types of geo-referenced big data and combine them with the space syntax analysis for observing and learning about the socioeconomic behavior and the quality of space. The observed and learned features are identified as the urban identity. The numeric features obtained from data mining are transformed into catalogued levels for designers to understand, which will allow them to propose proper designs that will complement or improve the local traditional features. A workshop in Taiwan, which focuses on a traditional area, demonstrates the result of the proposed methodology and how to transform a traditional area into a livable area. At the same time, we introduce a website platform, Quick Urban Analysis Kit (qua-kit), as a tool for citizens to participate in designs. After the workshop, citizens can view, comment, and vote on different design proposals to provide city authorities and stakeholders with their ideas in a more convenient and responsive way. Therefore, the citizens may deliver their opinions, knowledge, and suggestions for improvements to the investigated neighborhood from their own design perspective. more...

Urban water spaces, lakes and rivers have an impact on the image of the city and have played a key role in the socioeconomic development of cities throughout the centuries. This positive trend makes the redevelopment of waterfronts an ideal test-bed for new concepts of citizen engagement and adaptive and responsive architectural designs. Unfortunately, waterfronts often change and change is activated from bottom-up, but even today, we can not actively engage the users in the design process. Hence, in this project, we will build a floating proto-architectural system, consisting of a set of simple pre-defined modules which can be assembled, re-assembled and assembled again in different configurations by the end users (citizens) on-site, leading to a diverse number of more complex architectural and spatial variants. Water, as a key environmental and architectural feature of a given space, will serve as a medium for adaptability, flexibility and interaction with the city. Our proto-assembly will behave like an ancient FISH TRAP; but this time in London, in waters of Thames; our novel fish trap will harness latest material, technological and computational achievements and digital fabrication methods together with robust architectural design practices. The users will transform the old design idea of simple fish trap to a unique proto-architecture. more...

The paper introduces the methodology related to the topic of citizen-driven urban\ud design and revises the idea of on-site participation of end-users, which could\ud prospectively lead to customisation of architectural and urban space in a\ud full-scale. The research in the first phase addresses the engagement of\ud information technologies used for idea sketching in participatory design\ud workshop related to local urban issues in the city of Chur in Switzerland by means\ud of the Skity tool, the sketching on-line platform running on all devices. Skity\ud allows user, which can be individual citizens or a community, to sketch, build, and\ud adapt their ideas for the improvement of an urban locality. The participant is the\ud expert of the locality because he or she lives in this place every day. The content\ud of this paper is focused on the participatory design research project conducted as\ud a study at the ETH Zürich and the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft HTW in\ud Chur in collaboration with Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, mainly\ud concentrated on the first step of the methodological approach introduced here. more...

A city as a complex phenomenon and an entirety of events, its communication flows (information and data telecommunication networks and their access points), energy, goods and materials distribution and movement of users themselves and their spatial interactions with the environment nowadays no doubt has been creating new conditions and demands on the city's spatial organization, infrastructure, its growth and its thickening. Urban space today is an aggregate of complex dynamic processes which contribute to its configuration and mutually influence each other. Thus, urban environment shows emergent qualities and contains multi-layer scenarios of its own development and reconfiguration in time. This stratification is impossible to be comprehended by a linear model of a single predicted concept (top-down strategy). Architects and urban planners may, however, cover these specifics by a prediction of space development with a multi-layer result that would take into account the requirements of users at the lower level (bottom-up strategy). The aim of the research is therefore a spatial simulation of environment development, which would simulate its complexity, growth and reconfiguration. This spatial simulation would serve as a decision-making tool for architects when applying various scenarios of environment development and thereby it would create a basis for spatial planning decisions in subsequent stages of zoning proceedings. The final result of this research shall be a visualized algorithm in a model of spatial environment reconfiguration that could be serviceable also in the internet environment. This result implemented in a software tool can also serve as a creative platform for designing urban structure based on simple rules of a lower level that would, however, consequently simulate the complex urban entirety. Príspevok prezentuje dielčí výskum v oblasti návrhu procesov a spôsobov tvorby priestorovej a sociálnej interakcie multi-agentového systému s jeho prostredí v existujúcej mestskej urbánnej štruktúre. Podľa logiky definovaných vnútorných pravidiel nižšieho stupňa v simulačnom modeli vybraného územia je možné overovať a testovať komplexné nelineárne emergentné javy, ktoré majú za následok zmeny v konfiguráciách urbanistických štruktúr. more...

This research proposes a framework for signal processing and information fusion of spatial-temporal multi-sensor data pertaining to understanding patterns of humans physiological changes in an urban environment. The framework includes signal frequency unification, signal pairing, signal filtering, signal quantification, and data labeling. Furthermore, this paper contributes to human-environment interaction research, where a field study to understand the influence of environmental features such as varying sound level, illuminance, field-of-view, or environmental conditions on humans’ perception was proposed. In the study, participants of various demographic backgrounds walked through an urban environment in Zürich, Switzerland while wearing physiological and environmental sensors. Apart from signal processing, four machine learning techniques, classification, fuzzy rule-based inference, feature selection, and clustering, were applied to discover relevant patterns and relationship between the participants’ physiological responses and environmental conditions. The predictive models with high accuracies indicate that the change in the field-of-view corresponds to increased participant arousal. Among all features, the participants’ physiological responses were primarily affected by the change in environmental conditions and field-of-view., Information Sciences, 474, ISSN:0020-0255, ISSN:1872-6291 more...