large impervious surfaces and man-made waterways are the characteristic of urban area. increasing urbanization and rapid growth of cities in recent decades towards the upstream watershed, has been severely affected on rainfall-runoff processes in urban area. therefore, to computer models in order to illustrate these processes the proper design or assessment of urban drainage systems has special...

The rich identity, originality and validity of the “Ancient Iranian Urbanism and Architecture”, always have been stimulating the urban designers and planners to have research about their valuable qualities and historical principles. Unlike the past, today’s Iranian cities have inefficient urban qualities; because they are inspired by the western urban designs, without paying attention to their ...

The role of sustainability in urban design is becoming increasingly important as Australia’s cities continue to grow, putting pressure on existing infrastructure such as water, energy and transport. To optimise an urban design many different aspects such as water, energy, transport, costs need to be taken into account integrally. Integrated software applications assessing urban designs on a lar...

vernacular architecture has always had appropriate answer in conformity with the environment and climate. this paper has considered values of iran vernacular urbanization and architecture in humid and moderate climate looking through sustainability and sustainable development concepts. gorgan city has been studied using laboratory studies and available sources and relying on the content analysi...

Using a discourse analytic qualitative approach, we investigated the naturally-occurring discourse that arose as part of two kinds of regular course activities, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated discussions. The messages contributed by members of a graduate course were analyzed for the kind of discourse functions and the kind of politeness strategies they displayed. Results indicat...

Guangzhou city in South China has experienced an accelerated urban development since the 1980s. This paper examines the impact of the urban development on urban heat islands through a historical analysis of urban-rural air temperature differences. Remote sensing techniques were applied to derive information on land use/cover and land surface temperatures and to assess the thermal response patte...

Following our previous research on developing a dynamic virtual city system (Sheffield Urban Contextual Databank, SUCoD), the paper reports on a study of applying the virtual city resources to an undergraduate urban design course. The study focuses on how the multi-dimensional and multiple types of urban contextual data can be used by student designers directly for urban visual analysis and des...

In spite of the widespread use of the Internet, its potential for facilitating public involvement in urban planning projects has not yet been exploited. In this paper, the possibilities and limitations of integrating GIS, CG and the WWW for facilitating the public involvement in urban landscape evaluation are discussed. It is proposed that off-the-shelf 2D GIS and 3D CAD software can be efficie...