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Top1. Introduction And Background
The challenges of economic pressures, resource depletion, population growth, demographic change, CO2 emission targets and urbanisation mean that the world’s great cities need to adapt to survive and thrive over the coming decades, while ensuring long term economical, social and environmental sustainability. As a result, there is a trend towards forming stronger local partnerships that brings the key stakeholders together to address the challenges of creating sustainable cities (Department of Communities & Local Government, 2011; HM Government, 2011; Local Government Improvement & Development). Typical stakeholders that come together in implementing such sustainable agendas are local councils, police, environment agencies, health delivery organisations, educational establishments, housing associations, transport authorities, community groups etc. These partners need to work together to assess the performance of an area from their own view point and as a whole and to implement measures that can lead to a better environment that can bring social, economical and environmental prosperity.
As a result, collaboration among the key stakeholders in a city has become more important than ever before. As indicated in (Brand and Gaffikin, 2007; Hudson-Smith and Evans, 2001), collaboration plays an important role in making informed decisions in the urban regeneration process. While each group represents their own interest or the interest of an organisation, they need to work together to understand common challenges faced by a city or a local area as well as the inter-dependencies between proposed agendas (i.e. transport, housing, health, education etc.) with the view to identifying and resolving conflicts, and implementing joined up approaches where appropriate. Although the benefits of collaboration is well understood by many stakeholders (Al-Kodmany, 2001; Susskind, 2009), the implementation of such collaboration is challenging since there is no common technology platforms, collaboration processes and organisational structures in place for them to work as a virtual enterprise deploying advanced virtual prototyping technology that is common in other industries such as the aerospace and the automotive sectors.
Advances in VR technology have made it possible for planners to model urban environments in three-dimensional virtual space and use it as a tool for communicating proposed ideas to relevant stakeholders. In past years, many urban visualisation models have been developed. For example, Chan et al. (1998) presented an urban simulation system which combined 3D visualisation, GIS and database technology to establish a 3D urban simulation environment. Numerous groups have created over thousands of virtual models to represent various cities, such as SpacEyes3D(SpacEyes) and Virtual Berlin (2010). However, most of these city modelling platforms have put emphasis on visual realism and lack the ability to support the collaboration process between range of stakeholders who need to bring various social, physical, economical and environmental data sets to explore a broader regeneration agenda and build consensus in regenerating an area. As suggested by Pietsch (Pietsch et al., 2001), impressive “realistic” rendering is not enough for scenario simulation which is essential for collaborative urban planning and design.
This research presents an information modelling framework that can be used to construct an interactive virtual prototype of urban spaces that combines both social and physical data. It allows stakeholders to visually communicate the social and physical challenges of an urban space and engage in a meaningful discussion, based on evidence, towards developing sustainable environments. This framework was developed and validated by working closely with two live projects in the United Kingdom, involving a range of stakeholders, over the last five years.