Visualisation support for exploring urban space and place

Abstract

Urban research is fundamentally underpinned by heterogeneous, highly varied data. The availability and quantity of digital data sources is increasing rapidly. In order to facilitate decision-making and support processes related to urban policy and management, such data has to be readily analysed, synthesised and the results readily communicated to support evidence based decision-making. In this paper, we consider the current state of play of visualisation as it supports urban research. In doing so we firstly consider visualisation environments such as geographical information systems (GIS) and Cartography tools, digital globes, virtual simulation environments, building information models and gaming platforms. Secondly, we consider a number of visualisation techniques with a focusing on GIS and Cartography tools including space time cubes, heat maps, choropleth maps, flow maps and brushing.

This review of visualisation environments and techniques is undertaken in the context of the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network project (www.aurin.org.au). AURIN is tasked with developing a portal and associated e-Infrastructure, which provides seamless access to federated data, modelling and visualisation tools to support the urban researcher community in Australia. We conclude by outlining future research and development opportunities in developing the AURIN visualisation toolkit by reflecting on the value of visualisation as a data exploration and communication tool for researchers and decision-makers to assist with the study and management of the urban fabric.