The depiction and navigation of large-scale urban landscapes are limited by the great cost of traditional computer-aided design (CAD) models for large urban environment in terms of both the labor of data entry and the runtime computational expense. This article presents a hybrid modeling approach that enables rapid urban model production from legacy spatial data. Our scheme fills the gap betwee...

Urban storm inundation, which frequently has dramatic impacts on city safety and social life, is an emergent and difficult issue. Due to the complexity of urban surfaces and the variety of spatial modeling elements, the lack of detailed hydrological data and accurate urban surface models compromise the study and implementation of urban storm inundation simulations. This paper introduces a Const...

We investigate the spectral complexity and unique spectral characteristics of urban environments using a comprehensive regional field spectral library of more than 4500 individual spectra. Spectral properties of urban surface materials are presented and interpreted, and their separability is systematically analyzed using the Bhattacharyya distance (B-distance) as a quantitative measure of spect...

Urban planning statistics and evaluation is necessary for healthy and sustainable development of cities. However, it is not an easy task to perform statistics and evaluation because of the complexity of urban planning and the various involved data. In this paper, a GIS-based statistics and evaluation system is proposed to meet the unique requirements of the system, including multiple data type,...

The method of spectral analysis is employed to research the spatial dynamics of urban population distribution. First of all, the negative exponential model is derived in a new way by using an entropy-maximizing idea. Then an approximate scaling relation between wave number and spectral density is derived by Fourier transform of the negative exponential model. The theoretical results suggest the...

This paper identifies fundamental processes behind urban design. Rules are derived from connective principles in complexity theory, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. Any urban setting can be decomposed into human activity nodes and their interconnections. The connections are then treated as a mathematical problem (here in a qualitative manner). Urban design is most successful wh...

The world's human population is becoming concentrated into cities, giving rise to concerns that it is becoming increasingly isolated from nature. Urban public greenspaces form the arena of many people's daily contact with nature and such contact has measurable physical and psychological benefits. Here we show that these psychological benefits increase with the species richness of urban greenspa...