Urban Design Strategies for the Upcycling of Urban Infrastructure Residual Pockets: 3d City Modelling From Open Data and Low-Cost Rapid Mapping Tools

Abstract

Abstract. This paper deals with the 3D City Modelling specific procedure developed as a tool to support strategies for urban regeneration, within the framework of the B-ROAD research project.The B-ROAD research project, whose acronym stands for Below the Road, is developing urban design strategies for upcycling urban infrastructure residual pockets.The B-ROAD’s methodology is conceived as research by design as it is carried out by creating pilot scenarios, disclosing the latent and still unexpressed potential of these wasted areas and displaying their potential transformations, to turn them into precious resources for the contemporary city.The 3D City Modelling of the study area has proved to be essential and strategic yet often complex and critical as most of the spatial and architectural features of B-ROAD spaces, as well as their potential, cannot be detected nor represented through the traditional means of representation of urbanised land, as aerial survey-based representations, or GIS. Likewise, traditional, or even cutting-edge, survey techniques that can be used to acquire missing data are often costly and time-consuming, thus making it hardly impossible to achieve the purpose of extensive and deep knowledge of such a vast area. Thus, 3D City Modelling aimed at examining spaces and providing a final representation of pilot scenarios has been a crucial stage requiring a specific in-depth study.

Fast Survey Procedures in Urban Scenarios: Some Tests With 360° Cameras

“…The research presented comes from the work carried out for he B-ROAD project 1 , whose acronym stands for 'Below the Road', aimed at developing urban design strategies for upcycling urban infrastructure residual pockets in the city of Naples (Italy), converting them from waste to resource In particular, in order to digitise the analysed spaces, necessary for the prefiguration of possible urban regeneration intervention scenarios, data acquisition and processing methods were investigated that were expeditious, economical and at the same time adequately accurate from a metric and colorimetric point of view. With this objective in mind, B-ROAD used rapid mapping and modelling tools capable of returning digital models derived from image-based point clouds structured from spherical photographs, exploiting Structure from Motion algorithms (Stendardo et al, 2022). The decision to use 360° cameras responds, as previously stated, to several needs related to the project's field of investigation, which deals with architecturally complex areas such as infrastructure nodes.…”