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Reconstructing Real Cities in Google Earth
An anonymous reader writes "NewScientistTech has an article up on the way 3D models of real cities are being uploaded into Google Earth to help town planners and architects envisage their designs. Researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a method for rapidly mapping building, which they are using to reconstruct the rapidly-expanding town of Fayetteville. The researchers say tools like Google Earth and Sketchup could eventually help ordinary citizens get more involved in urban development."
NewScientistTech has an article up on the way 3D models of real cities are being uploaded into Google Earth to help town planners and architects envisage their designs.
That sounds like it would be good if you wanted to, say, judge building altitude and approach angle for flying a plan^^#$@%^^^^NOCARRIER
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"Trained urban planners often don't get a seat at the development table; what makes you think local governments would care about what ordinary laypeople think?"
Most urban planners do get their wishes through the city planners/council, wether through political favors or just plain bribes. However, in our city, I do know of one person who is using SketchUp to design a massive upgrade to a main corridor _in_ our city. He was using this feature before it has received the press it's been getting as of late. All of his models were being seriously considered and using an ArchiCad plugin, they can take the SketchUp models and estimate how much the material cost will be.
What it really takes are open minds to commit to a better future. If pre-visualization from anyone with a good idea can give that good idea to another, politics aside, people can see improvements faster than ever.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
I don't get it, isn't this already called SimCity?
Even with these great tools (and believe me I myself love this),I think the underlying problems willnot change.
1. Just because we can doesn't mean we will.
We have had out feet and a telephone for quite a while now but ordinary citizens rarely make it to town council meetings let a lone make a call to voice their opinion.
and, 2. Even if they did, since when to the politicians ever really listening to their constituants.
Hope this post wasn't too much of a downer. Have a great day.
___________________________
Free iPods? Its legit. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here!
I've been hoping for awhile that Google Earth would add a scroll-wheel doohickey that would allow the user to scroll backwards and forwards in time, and that Google would stitch in old/new image data as needed.
Kinda like watching SimCity, but with real roads and buildings...
I think ordinary citizens are too busy playing SimCity to get involved with this. This software won't have a chance against SimCity until they implement some decent disasters (Tornado, Nuclear Meltdown, Godzilla) that the user can unleash upon the city while laughing.
Urban planning is simply too boring otherwise!
"...help ordinary citizens get more involved in urban development."
So which is it? Seems like they're just playing around and making grandoise statements. I can see how this might be one tool for planners and architects (as if the don't already do this sort of thing), but give me a break -- helping ordinary citizens get involved in urban development? I sure hope not. I'd rather have intelligent people propose good designs. Move along, nothing to see here.
The aerial view will ensure that they don't put up anything that looks bad from our flying cars. Oh, wait...
Now if there was only a way to import this information into my SimCity game. Or any other Sim franchise game. Hell, any game, for that matter.
but I really don't believe it.
We just had a developer come in and build an apartment complex next to a mature neighborhood. Imagine that one day you have trees outside your house, and the next day you have a five-storey building.
We photoshopped a representation of what the apartment complex would do to the trees, and presented it to the DeKalb County (GA) commissioners, but it made no difference. I think they could see the added tax revenue to the county, and gave not a damn about the existing houses.
I wasn't personally affected - it was a number of my neighbors at the other end of the neighborhood, but I did learn that tools and the ability to predict impact don't really matter. What really matters is money to the local taxing authority.
Just sayin'.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I started using sketchup a while back for the geekiest of all possible reasons: creating and displaying models of places for a roleplaying game I was running.
(This is actually a surprisingly hard problem, which no other tools solve well. You need do deal with there being a complex model that already exists, but of which only a dynamic section is actually visible to players. Navigating an actual 3d model gives you the ability to convey great detail quickly, without ever having to worry about giving away too much. The players see exactly what they characters see, and you can get on with the actual game.)
So I started to place the locations that I'd modeled into Seattle (yes, Shadowrun), and was pleased to find that a lot of Seattle was already modeled in Earth, with yet more available in the google "3D Warehouse". It's basically the classic free software development model: everyone in the community works on something they find interesting, and we all benefit from one another's products.
At the architectural firm I used to work for, I had shown Google Earth to the principals and told them to keep it in mind for future proposals. A couple months later I was asked to composite some renderings into Google Earth for a proposal for a new facility at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was cool...I was able to drop the site plans directly onto the existing site. The renderings also had arrows indicating traffic flow, so I made the site plans into .PNGs and Google Earth recognized the transparency channel so the arrows were floating over the existing roads instead of over a white backgroud. I'm probably not describing this well, but the end result looked great and we won the project.
A developer gets recreational land rezoned as residential to put in a slew of houses (this happened down the street from me, albeit before I moved in). Tax base goes up, politicians get donations, everyone is excited... except the neighbors whose house is no longer down the street from a country club with a pool and instead has more houses... After a 5 year fight, the compromise is a rezone on half, and the other half becomes a park... everyone is somewhat happy (still having recreational features, although less than before, but now free), and developers make money, just not what they would if they could have used ALL the land. The new road is a non-issue, because they did it private so it could be gated... Now I am a supporter of property rights, but when the original neighborhood was built, the recreational use was part of "the deal" via zoning, so letting someone rezone in this case devalues everyone else, so they should get compensation, which the new park essentially is.
Maintaining those resources is now the city's burden, but it has the tax base to support it from the new houses, no problem. Now the city needs to run sewage, water, and other lines there... who should pay for that? Should the city pay for that to make the land more valuable for the developers, or should the developers pay for it as part of the rezone? Of course the costs get passed on to the buyers (although, in reality not entirely, i.e. if the person would pay $500k before, they aren't going to pay $525k for the same house just because the builder's costs went up)... in many ways, these costs get eaten by the developer, because they charge the owners whatever the market will pay, not cost + profit. Now, it is possible that these costs would make some development projects unprofitable as a result (increases costs cuts the supply curve raises prices and lowers quantities, not just increases prices).
I agree that once a part of the city, the new home owners are the same as everyone else, otherwise, it is pulling up the ladder. But ultimately, the "first citizens" had to pay for the roll-out of facilities through their taxes, and whenever someone buys that person's house, you implicitly paid for it because the value of the house in part includes those resources.
The anti-capitalist bent on Slashdot is a bit silly, as is the NIMBYism hidden in the anti-developer garbage. However, it's not clear to me that running sewage, water, electricity, and roads to a new location should be the city's responsibility, taxing existing tax-payers for services that they don't use doesn't seem right. I agree that once they move in they are equal, I'm just not sure why citizens 1-100 that already paid for the resources that they use (explicitly or implicitly) to pay for citizens 101-105 to move in seems fair, versus citizens 101-105 pay their startup costs...
Remember, you claim that developers pass it along to first owners (I don't agree that it is a 100% pass-through), in which case the owners are implicitly paying for it, same as all the other home owners. In fact, these new owners get a discount, because they only pay the marginal costs... if you argued that they should pay 5% of the existing sewage system's costs, I'd say you stepped over the line.
Now, this is all BS, because capital improvements are paid via bond issues, and therefore NOT paid by current tax payers, but future tax payers, including the new ones. However, I still think that marginal costs to the city should be paid for by the developers, and therefore cut into potential profits but not have the city subsidize developers.
Alex
Really.
This slashgeo.org story:
All Points Blog links to a ZDNet article where we learn the time tracking tool in Google Earth Pro will now be available in Google Earth Free (and GE Plus, of course!). From the article: "The feature in which a slider is used to scroll through time [...] now features a simplified interface. [...] showing how scientists, who had tracked the movements of a whale shark using GPS, had then mapped the creature's path using the application. Business uses could include fleet tracking or mapping the movements of transport infrastructure according to Google. Jones also described how the new version would enable users to track all of the geostationary satellites orbiting the earth." Ed Parsons was first to mention this news item.
And yes, it does also work with SketchUp buildings. Meaning you can scroll through time and watch buildings evoluate. Some published KML demonstrate this.
Animoog.org
Disclaimer: I am an urban planner. One of the things these free tools do is raise the expectations bar. Most planning departments have had access for many years to GIS tools which are far more capable than what the online tools can do. That said, the general public has not. I do not think that "ordinary citizens will get more involved" - I have been to enough public meetings to know what citizen apathy looks like - but I do think that the public's perception of what is possible in terms of visualization and presentation will change. Think CSI - doesn't every crime lab work that way? In terms of participation, there will still be the controvertial cases where city hall is packed with angry citizens reacting to the "greedy developer" coming to the city to "destroy the quality of life" or "make traffic a nightmare" but for the most part people have lives and do not care about local government unless it is a basic utility like water service, fire or police protection. When they do get involved, however, they will expect to see zooming and fly-throughs using aerial photos. I love the digital orthophotography but this stuff is expensive and not everyplace is covered.
my cube has a window...