The popularity of Internet technology has brought about some fundamental changes in the field of GIS. Internet GIS is emerging as a new technology to access, process, and disseminate spatial information over the Internet. Internet GIS cover a much wider audience than the traditional GIS. This...

Shape grammars specify a mechanism for performing recursive shape computations. A general paradigm is established for a computer implementation supporting this computation in the algebras of points and lines in two dimensions (<i>U_{0 2}</i> and <i>U_{1 2}</i>). The guiding principles and the actual...

Modelling was one of the main concerns of planning-related computing in the 1960s and 1970s, but declined in the 1980s when it was overshadowed by GIS applications. However, modelling is back, 'leaner' and more user-friendly, offering the vision (or rather, partial reality) of a complete desktop...

A common objection to the space syntax analysis of cities is that even in its own terms the technique of using a nonuniform line representation of space and analysing it by measures that are essentially topological ignores too much geometric and metric detail to be credible. In this paper it is...

Material constructs have fashioned and helped to structure South Africa. Throughout, not least in the thrusting, bursting commercial core of the country, Johannesburg, the ideology of racism has shaped and yet shapes our landscape. Everywhere, expressly in this coarse city of gold, buildings...

Much of the recent interest in urban design has focused on the creation and management of public spaces of cities. My aim in this paper is to explore the nature and role of public space and its significance for cities today. I look at how the promotion of public space is, on the one hand, a...

In Europe, during the early 20th century, new civic designs often drew upon images of medieval cities. In order to create the 'city of tomorrow', and define what was 'modern' in new city design, the medieval city frequently became characterized and depicted as 'natural' and 'irregular' in its...

In this paper I build on current research in urban and ecological simulation modeling to develop a conceptual framework for modeling the urban ecosystem. Although important progress has been made in various areas of urban modeling, operational urban models are still primitive in terms of their...

The use of municipal administrative data for performing urban design tasks is explored. The author describes a research project that uses geographic data, GIS-based algorithms, and mapping techniques to generate sketch plans. The nodes described by Kevin Lynch in 1960 in his book <i>The Image of...</i>

In <i>The Image of the City </i>Lynch defined aconcept of imageability or legibility of the physical form by the patternor structure of the interrelations among five elements. The well-knownelements are: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. When considered in pairs (for example, paths --...