Representing Spatiotemporal Context of Public Space for Urban Design

Abstract

Public space is one of the most important indicators of the quality of urban life. From a perspective of traditional urban planning, public spaces such as square, street, and plaza are significant elements of city environment to be designed. Designing public space in contemporary practice is rather a complicated decision-making process among diverse role players. It penetrates multiple layers of interest, ownership, and governance. This study stems from the crucial necessity of the common ground for understanding spatiotemporal context of public space. Since rapid urbanization increases complexity of the urban scene, the history of the place became difficult to be interpreted on site. Moreover, it is a quite compelling issue to determine cohesive spatial configuration across public and private spaces in urban design process. In this poster, we illustrated a series of experiments on data modeling and user interface design for four-dimensional media of urban design. Referring to data schema of empirically accessible data systems, we defined basic components that consist of public space including indoor public space in the private building, privately owned public open space, using Building Information Model (BIM) standard and geospatial Application Programming Interface (API) standard. The experiment delivers the scenario of dynamic timelines that conveys diverse user interaction over such physical description of urban space. The fundamental goal of this study is to develop an ontology of public space for mutually comprehensible design process among diverse role-takers over time.