Between Old and New: Urban Interventions in German City Centres

The collective memory of European cities is preserved not only in monuments and urban artefacts,but also in the minute structure of urban parcels and blocks,in the layout of streets,squares and natural elements.This memory,often canceled and partially removed during last century,survives beyond its material dimension,also through the representation of its image transmitted to us through iconographic documents.Through these documents we can imagine these spaces that have slowly built up over time as real lieux de mémoire.The rebirth of those places inside German historical centers is based on different levels:the morphological layout of urban spaces and blocks,the typological solution of each house,the urban image recreated,between philologic re-proposal and critical reinterpretation.The aim of regaining its lost historicity depends on the appropriateness of architectural and technical solutions adopted in each project,beyond too simplistic oppositions between terms like Old&New or Authentic&Fake.In this sense,such case-studies are not to be understood as nostalgic attempts to reproduce the city as it was,nor as artificial simulacra or hyperrealities,but as mature examples of critical reconstruction,according to the meaning introduced in the European debate since the 1970s.

The Limits of Domestic Spatiality in the Information Age-A Secondary Publication

The limits of spatiality have blurred in the information age;a phenomenon that can be observed through the socio-spatial implications of Internet use in the domestic sphere.How and why are the use and organization of space-time around the Internet shaping a new domestic spatiality that intertwines the digital space with the production of social space through the practice of habits,presence,and interaction of individuals?What are the repercussions of the superimposition of digital space on human existence?The units of analysis were integrated through the sum of people and middle-class housing in the face of the digitalization process in the city of San Luis Potosi,Mexico.The questionnaire consisted of 35 questions designed from the Likert scale under the thematic order of presence,interaction,and habituality.The data were analyzed using SPSS software.This research contributes to explaining the current period in the history of inhabitable space,dominated by the simultaneous interrelationships between individuals,digital space,and architecture,which result in the detachment and devaluation of physical domestic space,while also highlighting the lack of control and regulation of individuals over the Internet.

Evaluation of Three-dimensional Urban Expansion: A Case Study of Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China

With rapid urban development in China in the last two decades, the three-dimensional(3D) characteristic has been the main feature of urban morphology. However, the vast majority of researches of urban growth have focused on the planar area(two-dimensional(2D)) expansion. Few studies have been conducted from a 3D perspective. In this paper, the 3D urban expansion of the Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China from 2003 to 2012 was evaluated based on Geographical Information System(GIS) tools and high-resolution remote sensing images. Four indices, namely weighted average height of buildings, volume of buildings, 3D expansion intensity and 3D fractal dimension are used to quantify the 3D urban expansion. The weighted average height of buildings and the volume of buildings are used to illustrate the temporal change of the 3D urban morphology, while the other two indices are used to calculate the expansion intensity and the fractal dimension of the 3D urban morphology. The results show that the spatial distribution of the high-rise buildings in Yangzhou has significantly spread and the utilization of the 3D space of Yangzhou has become more efficient and intensive. The methods proposed in this paper laid a foundation for a wide range of study of 3D urban morphology changes.

Personal Urbanities： Domesticating the Public Domain

City and personality have never been easily associated. Historically, since classical antiquity, urban space has always been the reflection of a collective identity representing the natural inclination of human beings to live in group. However, according to Lewis Mumford, the city has been the context in which another ideal arose--the concept of personality. This ideal, according to the official history of urban design, seems to have had a very marginal role, if not as a formal or functional analogous structure. Nevertheless, looking at the physical consistence of built space--as well as its ideal formulation--it is not difficult to find some evidence of Mumford＇s theory. Therefore, the paper, through an architectural overview ranging from classical street-side benches to contemporary digital cities, aims at outlining the progressive change in the representation of urban identities from a collective to a more personal dimension. It describes how public space design, especially during the last 30 years, has redefined its strategies in order to increase the possibilities of personal intervention for users, and it focuses on the gradual shift of this discipline towards other scales, instruments and objectives, in a sudden disciplinary convergence with interior architecture and industrial design. Thus, showing how a pervasive process of domestication is nowadays transforming not only the use, but also the symbolic meaning that the public domain has traditionally had.

Progress on CASEarth Satellite Development

CASEarth satellite is the first space Earth science satellite produced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.The satellite has three payloads:high-definition Thermal Infrared Spectrometer(TIS),highdefinition Glimmer Imager for Urbanization(GIU),and high-definition Multispectral Imager for Inshore(MII).These payloads are used to explore the urbanization level and residential layout,the coastal ecosystem,and new methods and approaches of environmental detection during night-time and even under conditions of polar aurora and provide scientific evidence for the refined depiction of human traces.The CASEarth satellite can provide space observation data for A Project on Big Earth Data Science Engineering as well as scientific and application studies inside and outside China.

Study on the Urban Heat Island Effects and Its Relationship with Surface Biophysical Characteristics Using MODIS Imageries

This study assesses surface urban heat island (UHI) and its associated surface physical characteristics using remote sensing approaches. TERRA/MODIS images acquired in 2005 in three different seasons were selected to generate land surface tem-perature and surface characteristics for the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan area in China. The intensity of urban heat is-land effects and its seasonal variations were examined. The result showed that UHI effects were significant both in the summer and the spring. Land surface temperatures in the city were 8 ℃ to 10℃ warmer than those in surrounding rural areas in the spring and the summer seasons. Although UHI effects exist in winter, they are not significant. Land surface temperature in the city was 4℃ warmer than that in surrounding rural areas in winter. This study uses normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normal-ized difference built-up index (NDBI) as indicators of surface physical characteristics and investigates the relationship among land surface temperature (LST), NDVI and NDBI. The results from this study indicate that, while the relationship between LST and NDVI changes in different seasons, there is a strong positive linear relationship between NDBI and LST for all seasons. The amount of slope and intercept of the linear relationship between NDBI and LST can indicate the magnitude of UHI for different seasons. This finding suggests that NDBI provides an alternative physical indicator for analyzing LST quantitatively over different seasons, and therefore providing a useful way to study UHI effects using remote sensing.

Fusion of urban remote image based on multi-characteristics

A fusion approach is proposed to refine the resolution of urban multi-spectral images using the corresponding high-resolution panchromatic （PAN） images. Firstly, the two images are decomposed by wavelet transformation, and five texture features are extracted from high-frequency detailed sub-images. Then a multi-characteristics fusion rule is used to merge wavelet coefficients from the two images according to the extracted features. Experimental results indicate that, comparing with the non-characteristic methods, the proposed method can efficiently preserve the spectral information while improving the spatial resolution of the urban remote sensing images.