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This study presents the latest results from a project aimed at creating an atlas of the Metaverse in architecture and design. The project is structured as an interactive conceptual map, published online, and spans from 1980-2023. It catalogs and thematically classifies some of the primary configurations of ‘virtual living’ and the most significant conceptual and visual references that have contributed to this idea. The subject is vast and complex, with applications in research and teaching that extend to various digital space-time applications, such as social media, virtual worlds, video games, conceptual maps, and current applications of artificial intelligence and NFTs. This interdisciplinary project requires thematic studies and surveys primarily aimed at understanding and historicizing the phenomenon of the Metaverse. This is the main objective of the research presented here, representing the final stage of a long journey that explores the various aspects of virtual living representation history. The topic deserves further study, both in relation to the rich historical tradition that has always inspired the science and art of representation, and in relation to the techno-cultures of processing ‘Virtual Living’. It encompasses various professions and languages within the expressive-communicative apparatus that characterizes the Metaverse.

Professor of the MARCHI Mikhail Belov and Associate Professor Petr Zavadovsky offered the students of their group not only to complete the standard training program of the MARCHI, but also to build together a virtual utopia city of Nikolograd. The successful experiment has been going on for three years now. Students learn how to design various types of buildings: clubs, residential buildings, theaters, etc. – everything that is provided by the MARCHI program, as well as work in a team, creating a virtual city with a unique appearance based on their individual projects. Teachers allow students to work in different styles, use historical prototypes, which involves an in-depth study of the history of architecture and urban planning. The experiment is unique. An original method of training future architects can be developed on its basis.

Maps produced using remote sensing (RS) and photogrammetry techniques are commonly used today. Alongside rapidly advancing technology, RS, photogrammetric sensors, and transportation platforms are changing and evolving. Particularly, the advancement in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has facilitated access to aerial images. Besides being faster compared to other methods, the inclusion of spatial information makes UAV imagery advantageous. The increasing urban population and the expansion, renewal, and growth of cities have heightened the need for rapidly and accurately collected spatial data. UAV usage is one of the methods in accessing the required raw data. 3D building models, being a crucial component of 3D virtual city models, play an important role in detecting existing buildings through digital products produced via photogrammetric methods from UAV-obtained aerial imagery. Considering that our country is prone to earthquakes, there is a significant need for 3D virtual models of our cities. The possible creation of a 3D virtual city model enables the determination of material damage post-earthquake and facilitates access to information about the residents in the area. In this study, the New Neighborhood district of Şefaatli, Yozgat, was selected as the application area. As a result of the study, a 3D virtual model of the neighborhood located in the stream bed was created. The 3D virtual model has successfully achieved its purpose by carrying information in addition to the 3D appearance of the buildings in the attribute data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essential requirement of alignment design system includes integration of massive geographic information, various modes of interactive operation, multiple expression and observation manners for alignment scheme. This paper sets up a 3D virtual city through an open source toolkit named osgEarth; integrates various GIS data affecting route scheme inside a 3D virtual scene after process; proposes a dynamic modeling method for objects in virtual city scene; supplies approaches to edit horizontal and vertical alignments through interaction interface of the scene and QT view framework. Based on stretch method from cross section of structures, the proposed technique could create simplified BIM models of subgrade, bridge, and tunnel to express the design idea of alignment engineer. Benefit of the compatibility of 3D modeling files, the complicated station models could be rendered. The scene efficiency is improved by LOD technique. The research results show that the proposed 3D alignment design system could make sure the rendering fluency after multi-source data integration in the scene, and could realize synchronous 3D design for many projects and schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban water and power supply networks with interdependent characteristics are essential components of urban infrastructures and play an important role in maintaining the daily operations and post-disaster recovery of cities. The aim of this study is to provide a method for researchers of resilient cities to build virtual water and power supply networks according to their basic physical mechanisms so that they can complete the risk or resilience evaluation of benchmark cities when some confidential infrastructure information is difficult to obtain. The innovation is that a new design framework for urban virtual water and power networks with interdependent characteristics combined with geographic information is suggested based on the perspective of practical engineering. After giving an overview of the framework, this paper presents the planning and design of the water and power supply networks as well as the interdependence between them in detail. Then the water and power supply networks of a virtual city called Virtual Shangcheng City are established, which verify the feasibility and practicality of the approach. This framework can establish virtual water and power supply networks with interdependent characteristics that conform to actual engineering and urban geographic information characteristics. Moreover, it can provide an effective modeling method for water and power supply networks in the absence of data for urban resilience and disaster risk studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ruins of ancient cities hold valuable information for historians and archeologists and it allows them to learn about the society and culture of these cities. This paper explores the first attempt to virtually rebuild the historic city of Karakorum based on ruins and archeological findings from the 13th century AD. Further, the analytical and practical methods used to discover its unique urban planning and architectural form by reconstructing the city using various resources from archeological documents to historical science documents are introduced. We explore a digitized version of Karakorum city in an immersive and embodied manner because of the latest technological advances in virtual reality, and this allows us to conserve and visualize its cultural heritage. The research objectives of this study are to (1) create a three‐dimensional visual model of the Karakorum city as close as possible to its real counterpart, and (2) use a game engine as a development platform for integration and interactive visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The virtual reality of cities is the current historical period of urban progress and a kind of interconnected co-activity between innovative virtual elements, elements of the city and its urban parts according to the affected relationships of social, financial, cultural, spatial, political and local features. Where contemporary concepts of virtual reality were presented by the philosophical corps without clarifying their role comprehensively in the urban development processes of cities, so the research aimed to determine the roles of the ideas of the virtual world and the virtual city in the work of both specialists and decision makers, and the urban development processes of traditional and historical cities, where the research information methodology compares theoretical architectural and urban models to intersect with the basic concepts related to the virtual city, the research reached multi-level roles in terms of impact and degrees of complexity, which contribute to an innovative reproduction of urban development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 21st century has brought fundamental changes in the development of cities, with the spread of ICT and the rise of digitalization. The new technologies are increasingly making their mark on urban planning and policy as well. The question of how contemporary urban planning is adapting to new challenges is particularly relevant as neighborhoods built in previous centuries and decades by traditional planning methods are now increasingly confronted with new public and environmental demands. Despite the bad reputation of Budapest's 8th district, Józsefváros, based on the socio-economic and urban problems it has continuously faced in the past, the neighborhood has become one of the most dynamically developing urban areas in the last decade. From a planning point of view, an exciting area of the district is Szigony Street and its wider surroundings due to the strongly fragmented, heterogeneous urban fabric. Nevertheless, the only high-rise mass housing estate built in Budapest's historic inner city in the 1960s and 1970s is located there. Our research used a complex methodology (document, content and database analysis, fieldwork, surveys with professionals, and interviews) to explore the planning history of the area's development. Ultimately, the aim was to identify the most important outcomes and consequences of traditional and contemporary planning and design and whether modern digital planning can make a meaningful contribution to the development of the neighborhood. Our results show that urban planning and development in Budapest are still essentially based on traditional top-down approaches. Digitalization has a role to play primarily in visualization and contextualization but digitalizing of planning alone will not solve problems and past planning mistakes that affect the urban fabric of a neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 21st century has brought fundamental changes in the development of cities, with the spread of ICT and the rise of digitalization. The new technologies are increasingly making their mark on urban planning and policy as well. The question of how contemporary urban planning is adapting to new challenges is particularly relevant as neighborhoods built in previous centuries and decades by traditional planning methods are now increasingly confronted with new public and environmental demands. Despite the bad reputation of Budapest’s 8th district, Józsefváros, based on the socio-economic and urban problems it has continuously faced in the past, the neighborhood has become one of the most dynamically developing urban areas in the last decade. From a planning point of view, an exciting area of the district is Szigony Street and its wider surroundings due to the strongly fragmented, heterogeneous urban fabric. Nevertheless, the only high-rise mass housing estate built in Budapest’s historic inner city in the 1960s and 1970s is located there. Our research used a complex methodology (document, content and database analysis, fieldwork, surveys with professionals, and interviews) to explore the planning history of the area’s development. Ultimately, the aim was to identify the most important outcomes and consequences of traditional and contemporary planning and design and whether modern digital planning can make a meaningful contribution to the development of the neighborhood. Our results show that urban planning and development in Budapest are still essentially based on traditional top-down approaches. Digitalization has a role to play primarily in visualization and contextualization but digitalizing of planning alone will not solve problems and past planning mistakes that affect the urban fabric of a neighborhood.

Urban water and power supply networks with interdependent characteristics are essential components of urban infrastructures and play an important role in maintaining the daily operations and post-disaster recovery of cities. The aim of this study is to provide a method for researchers of resilient cities to build virtual water and power supply networks according to their basic physical mechanisms so that they can complete the risk or resilience evaluation of benchmark cities when some confidential infrastructure information is difficult to obtain. The innovation is that a new design framework for urban virtual water and power networks with interdependent characteristics combined with geographic information is suggested based on the perspective of practical engineering. After giving an overview of the framework, this paper presents the planning and design of the water and power supply networks as well as the interdependence between them in detail. Then the water and power supply networks of a virtual city called Virtual Shangcheng City are established, which verify the feasibility and practicality of the approach. This framework can establish virtual water and power supply networks with interdependent characteristics that conform to actual engineering and urban geographic information characteristics. Moreover, it can provide an effective modeling method for water and power supply networks in the absence of data for urban resilience and disaster risk studies.

One of the main characteristics of Oldenburg's concept of Third Places is the condition of being a neutral space, friendly to everyone regardless of social status, age or gender. The concept, in its intended course, enables social activities that go beyond easily available cognitive prescriptions. Consequently, Third Places seem to play an important role in the process of formation of communities. They can be perceived as „places in between“; on the borderline of domestic intimacy and the imposed sterility of the workplace. There is an atmosphere of „freedom from“ socialization and „freedom to“ engage in relations with „familiar strangers“ (Milgram, 1977). This essay aims to demonstrate the possibility of existence the virtual third places and present the argument that the way in which such social spaces develop and operate is a key factor in the implementation and functioning of virtual urban spaces. Self-determined social world Second Life will serve as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is aimed at carrying out a comparative analysis of different approaches to the definition of concepts of «smart city» and «smart sustainable city», as well as formalizing these concepts for their implementation, which will potentially contribute to spreading of both the concept and the national practice of sustainable urban development, including the economic, environmental, and general justice issues. The main reasons connected with the key role of cities in the social and economic aspects of people’s life over the world and the enormous influence on the ecological stability are considered; the main current scientific sources concerned with the research on «smart» cities are covered, and their comparative analysis is carried out. The definitions of other alternative concepts such as «digital» city, «intellectual» city, «virtual» city, etc., representing more concrete and less inclusive levels of development of city, are considered in detail and presented. The differences between the concept of «smart city» and other related terms in three categories are discussed. A detailed analysis of different keywords from different sources is carried out. Based on the carried out analysis, six primary categories have been identified: smart life, smart people, smart environment and sustainability, smart management, smart mobility and smart economy, which are important for understanding the essence of «smart» sustainable city.

We have arrived at a time for deepening the scholarly analysis of documents that validate and/or reveal urban circumstances. Traditional methodologies of architectural and urban history must remain the foundation of digital approaches because the study of a city will always necessitate scholarly decryption of information and visual sources that connect them to their broader context. For this reason, iconographic and textual documents in archives and libraries – primary data of exceptional value not only from an historical point of view, but also for interpretative inflections – can now be embedded as a part of the new scientificmethodological practice that digital applications offer.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/DISEGNARECON.21.2018.ED

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Singapore, branded as a "City in a Garden", has a long standing commitment to green the nation, one which has resulted in trees becoming an integral component of the urban environment. Similarly for its digital twin, Virtual Singapore, we undertake the research to automate the population of this virtual city with semantically and biologically representative trees in a CityGML (City Geography Markup Language) format. This paper presents our framework of modeling trees for Virtual Singapore, showcasing an array of methodologies in data acquisition of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and satellite images, tree extraction and quantification, and 3D tree modeling at LODs (level of details) 1, 2 and 3. The paper will also highlight challenges and chosen methodologies along with the preliminary results of this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of urban drainage systems is challenged by rapid urbanization; however, little attention is paid to the urban form and its effects on these systems. This study develops an integrated city-drainage model that configures typical urban forms and their associated drainage infrastructures, specifically domestic wastewater and rainwater systems, to analyze the relationship between them. Three typical types of urban forms were investigated: the square, the star, and the strip. Virtual cities were designed first, with the corresponding drainage systems generated automatically and then linked to a model herein called the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). Evaluation was based on 200 random configurations of wastewater/rainwater systems with different structures or attributes. The results show that urban forms play more important roles on three dimensions of performance, namely economic efficiency, effectiveness, and adaptability, of the rainwater systems than of the wastewater systems. Cost is positively correlated to the effectiveness of rainwater systems among the different urban forms, while adaptability is negatively correlated to the other two performance dimensions. Regardless of the form, it is difficult for a city to make its drainage systems simultaneously cost-effective, efficient, and adaptable based on the virtual cities we investigated. This study could inspire the urban planning of both built-up and to-be-built areas to become more sustainable with their drainage infrastructure by recognizing the pros and cons of different macroscale urban forms.