After the passage of several decades of having the experience of employing regeneration plans through conservation and development, examining the results of these policies can be a topic for extensive investigations. These are the topics that inattention toward them has so far resulted in the circumstances in which not only regeneration plans have been frustrated in the realization of their obj...

The Urban Heat Island effect concerns the higher air temperature in urban environment with respect to the rural one. This phenomenon has been well known for hundreds of years, but it has been experimentally studied only for the last few decades and in large metropolis. The paper reports on the experimental results obtained during the period 2010–2011 in a medium size city of Italy by the resear...

When creating 3D city models, selecting relevant visualization techniques is a particularly difficult user interface design task. A first obstacle is that current geodata-oriented tools, e.g. ArcGIS, have limited 3D capabilities and limited sets of visualization techniques. Another important obstacle is the lack of unified description of information visualization techniques for 3D city models. ...

This work reports a first attempt to use Landsat satellite imagery to identify possible urban microclimate changes in a city center after a seismic event that affected L'Aquila City (Abruzzo Region, Italy), on 6 April 2009. After the main seismic event, the collapse of part of the buildings, and the damaging of most of them, with the consequence of an almost total depopulation of the historic c...

Three-dimensional modelling tools can be extended and applied to fields other than manufacturing and design. Such tools can prove useful for the visualisation of historical information both for research and within a museum exhibition setting. This paper reports upon a set of software based upon a database of buildings, people, and lots from 18th century Montrhal which uses computer visualisatio...

There is a great need throughout the Middle East and North Africa for contemporary urban research that goes beyond classical analysis of the traditional Arab City. Important topics include urban transformation, the flow of global capital and its affect on urban realities, urban structures and polity, changes in social life and lines of inclusion and exclusion , and such " metropolitization " fo...