In the cities of post-industrialized countries, renovation is the main part of building construction activity and has a major urban impact. Measuring this ongoing phenomenon and its distribution is of great usefulness for municipality urban planning and public policies. In this context, it is essential to introduce tools and processes that can allow for describing and predict how building renovation evolves. Open databases have become a valuable resource for observing processes and interactions in urban context. Data-driven analysis methods were used to directly interact with open city data, thus aiming to propose an alternative building renovation approach based on data gathering, parametric modeling, and visualization. Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is an efficient tool that overcomes incomplete data, as not all renovation is reported to city halls. This article presents a preliminary study on a method of measuring building renovation intensity using the city of Lisbon building permit alphanumerical and spatial database as a case study.

This paper analyses how architecture became a pioneer discipline in digital interactivity research. It describes how that pioneer research derives from a lineage of researchers whose work spans more than two decades beginning in the early fifties. Military funds enabled the creation of the first computer graphic interfaces that evolved into a ``drawing machine'', the first interactive CAD, that made possible the role of architecture as a pioneering discipline in interactivity research. It is expected to demonstrate that the same architecture that nowadays uses mainly interactive digital design was one of first disciplines to research interactivity addressing a gap in the study of the link between architecture and interactivity.

Considering the question of collaborative research in architecture with other arts and science, the research outlines a historic perspective of transdisciplinary digital architecture through the work of key personalities by establishing links between them. Researches on digital architecture history are generally grounded on methods with limited sets of primary sources and relevant data is overlooked. Following the increasing availability of digital data there are sources of information widely available on the internet, which have been previously ignored, and by using this new methodology they can be useful for scientific research, and specifically for this research. Data-driven and geospatial approaches can allow researchers to address multidimensional aspects. This paper presents the first preliminary results of an ongoing research.

In the last few years, building renovation has gained an unprecedented relevance in Portugal, yet it is an asymmetric and urban phenomenon for the study of which, in space and in time, traditional statistic tools have limitations. Using computational tools, it is possible to generate maps that correlate building permits georeferenced data and their processing time. Using Lisbon City Hall database of planning applications and georeferenced vector information, two approaches are developed to represent the internal dynamic of renewal of the city between 2010 and 2016. These maps can be useful to improve the accessibility of planning information to citizens.