Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Visual City
Andy Hudson-Smith
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London
Nothing in the city is experienced by itself for a city's perspicacity is the sum of its surround-
ings. To paraphrase Lynch (1960), at every instant, there is more than we can see and hear.
This is the reality of the physical city, and thus in order to replicate the visual experience of
the city within digital space, the space itself must convey to the user a sense of place. This is
what we term the 'Visual City', a visually recognizable city built out of the digital equivalent
of bricks and mortar, polygons, textures and most importantly data.
Recently there has been a revolution in the production and distribution of digital arte-
facts which represent the visual city. Digital city software that was once in the domain of
high-powered personal computers, research labs and professional software is now in the
domain of the public-at-large through both the web and low-end home computing. These
developments have gone hand in hand with the re-emergence of geography and geographic
location as a way of tagging information to non-proprietary web-based software such as
Google Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft's Virtual Earth, ESRI's ArcExplorer and NASA's
World Wind, amongst others. The move towards 'digital Earths' for the distribution of
geographic information has, without doubt, opened up a widespread demand for the vi-
sualization of our environment where the emphasis is now on the third dimension. While
the third dimension is central to the development of the digital or visual city, this is not the
only way the city can be visualized, for a number of emerging tools and 'mashups' are en-
abling visual data to be tagged geographically using a cornucopia of multimedia systems. We
explore these social, textual, geographical and visual technologies throughout this chapter.
9.1 The development of digital space
Digital space takes many forms. However in terms of the visual city, we are concerned
with the creation of space that allows us to generate a visual understanding of our built
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