Several important goals for Urban GIS involve to Documentation, Information and Management Systems (DiMAS). Nowadays, there are good solutions for each one of them, but their integration poses still some non-trivial challenges. Between others, these challenges involve to a) interoperability between different tools, b) customized provision of services, and c) interactive dialogue with changing e...

This paper describes urban wind ventilation mapping, using the concept of “building frontal area index”, and uses the Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong as an example of a dense, sub-tropical urban environment where ventilation is critical for human health. The frontal area index is calculated for uniform 100 m grid cells, based on three dimensional buildings in each cell, for eight different wind ...

The Dutch cities Utrecht and Wijk bij Duurstede were founded by the Romans around 50 B.C. and the village Fijnaart and Graft-De Rijp around 1600 A.D. The soils of these villages are polluted with Pb (up to ~5000 mg/kg). Lead isotope ratios were used to trace the sources of Pb pollution in the urban soils. In ~75% of the urban soils the source of the Pb pollution was a mixture of glazed potsherd...

Department of Building Technology, Lagos State Polytechnic, Lagos, Nigeria. Corresponding Author: D.O Olanrewaju ________________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract The importance of decent housing has been well recognized, articulated and elucidated in the literature, yet a great proportion of the urban poor in Nigeria especially in Lagos State sti...

The goal of this paper is to present bluff body flow and transport from steady point sources of pollutants, or chemical and biological agents in an idealized urban environment This paper includes ventilation behavior in different street canyon configurations. To evaluate dispersion in a model urban street canyon, a series of tests with various street canyon aspect ratios (B=H) are presented. Bo...

The availability of Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data opens the possibility to characterize urban areas by means of this sensor all over the world. In particular, the global digital elevation model (DEM) can provide a three-dimensional atlas of urban agglomerates. However, the coarse ground resolution and the problems due to radar imaging of the complex urban environments do not allo...

In recent years, high-albedo materials and products have been utilized for urban building roofs and roads to lower their surface temperatures. These high-albedo materials and products include those with spectral selectivity. Accordingly, a numerical simulation was conducted to investigate the spectral dependency and characteristics of the urban albedo. The distribution of the spectral albedo re...

“Urban Pixels” are wireless, solar-powered lighting units for cities that blur the boundary between digital display technology and traditional urban lighting. By combining a renewable energy source with RF communication it is possible to achieve a self-sustaining, distributed display network that can be attached to any building surface and reconfigured with ease. Depending on their configuratio...