Urban traffic plans (UTPs) are tactical planning tools for managing urban areas and traffic noise abatement is one of their objectives, explicitly provided for under Italian law. To date, the various models and methods for estimating traffic noise have concerned its estimation in a point (or on a road segment). In this paper we propose a method that is able to evaluate the effects of UTPs on no...

Urban growth and the development of urban plans make cities grow and substantially alter, in relatively short time periods, their land covers and land uses (LULC). To take control of this urban growth, it is important to create and update the LULC database. In this work, a method to automatically extract land covers from satellite VHR imagery and LIDAR data is presented. This method is based on...

Modern games often feature highly detailed urban environments. However, buildings are typically represented only by their façade, because of the excessive costs it would entail to manually model all interiors. Although automated procedural techniques for building interiors exist, their application is to date limited. One of the reasons for this is because designers have too little control over ...

Developing countries are starting the process of planning for climate change adaptation at the national level. One of the options available is ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA), which recognizes the value of ecosystem services and biodiversity for reducing people's vulnerability to climate change. The effectiveness of EbA is increasingly recognized and EbA options have been used by least-develop...

extended abstract 1. introduction after industrial revolution, complex economic and technical developments led to wide changes in the size of cities, the proportion of the population in urban areas, and the growth rate of urbanization (johnson, 1998). more than half of the world population currently lives in urban areas and the uncontrolled expansion of cities is becoming a global concern. it i...

Since the introduction of the concept of Digital Earth, almost every major international city has been re-constructed in the virtual world. A large volume of geometric models describing urban objects has become freely available in public domain via software like Google Earth. Although mostly created for visualization, these urban models can benefit many applications beyond visualization includi...

In the ever-growing travel demand, traffic congestion on freeways and expressways recurs more frequently at a higher number of locations and for longer durations with added severity. This becomes especially true in large metropolitan areas. Particular to the urban areas, excessive crowdedness caused by inefficient traffic control also results in urban street networks operating in near or over-s...

Gearing cities towards a path of sustainability is a daunting task. The urban models that we have come to accept during the 20 century need to be revisited, but change, even if welcomed in abstract, is usually met in reality with enormous resistance from the economic and political models that underlie our cities. Some of the most powerful tools for promoting change are those related to conceptu...