Fast and unplanned city growth, has effects such as isolation of village societies, threatening urbancores and centers and small and weak societies, destruction of open spaces and open and natural regions. Smart growthoffers a sustainable way for urban developing with appropriate use of available sources, increase of urban services,developing neighborhoods with different uses, making public tra...

growing tendency for urbanization and rapid development of the cities has resulted in urban neighborhoods obstructing the access of each other to the natural sources e.g. solar energy, natural ventilation. sunlight as the main part of input energy in urban energy balance equation and natural lighting is of vital importance. this paper attempts to achieve an optimum morphology for residential bl...

The presence of people in urban spaces and related components is one of the most important issues in the field of behavioral sciences in urban studies. The mechanism of static presence in urban spaces is influenced by factors that generally determine the quality of social life in these spaces. The present study examines the way people are present in urban spaces in relation to each other, and i...

Urban fabric characterization is very useful in urban design, planning, modeling and simulation. It is traditionally considered as a descriptive task mainly based on visual inspection of urban plans. Cartographic databases and geographic information systems (GIS) capabilities make possible the analytical formalization of this issue. This paper proposes a renewed approach to characterize urban f...

Neema Bhatt received her Bachelor of Architecture from Bangalore University, India, In 1989. She worked at HUDCO as a student-trainee tora periodof twelve weeks and has been associated with HUDCO since then. She has worlced at the architectural planning and research laboratory (APRL) at the University ofMichigan. Her currant professional Interests are in urban planning and landscape architectur...

New techniques to measure 2-D and 3-D visibility over urban spaces are presented in this paper. The concept of ‘isovist’, i.e. the visible space from a vantage point, could help in providing a quantifiable basis for Kevin Lynch's urban analysis, as outlined in his book The Image of the City. We also expand on the concept of 3-D isovists and develop a new technique to calculate them on Digital E...