A Unified Information Framework for Building A Common Vision in Sustainable City Development

Creating sustainable cities requires a stronger collaboration between a range of public and private sector organisations to ensure cities are safer, healthier, intelligent and prosperous places for citizens to experience an enhanced quality of life. Within this context, urban planning and regeneration projects play a major role where stakeholders need to come together to assess the current challenges or the opportunities within a city and implement projects that transform the physical, social and environmental dimensions to create prosperous and sustainable futures. Within these projects, stakeholders need to assess “social data intelligence” collected by individual agencies and also understand how proposed complex agendas such as transport, health, education and employment could lead to a better environment that can bring social, economical and environmental prosperity. This research proposes a novel Urban Information Framework that allows the stakeholders to integrate their datasets (both spatial and non-spatial) together to create a unified 3D virtual prototype of a city that can be used to represent both the current state of a city as well as intended futures. The proposed Urban Information Framework allows the stakeholders to combine different datasets together, whether they be social or physical transformation agendas, to understand the dependencies or to build up narratives that could be communicated visually to others. The overall framework has been developed and validated by working closely with two major regeneration projects in UK. A Unified Information Framework for Building A Common Vision in Sustainable City Development Jialiang Yao, Thinklab, School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, Salford,UK Terrence Fernando, Thinklab, School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, Salford, UK Ian Everall, Thinklab, School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, Salford, UK