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 argues for hands-on, contextual and problem-solving collaborations, that is, for a transdisciplinary approach that establishes direct connections between social and technical disciplines. It is based on our experience as a team of researchers at the Vitruvius Fab Lab (Digital Fabrication Laboratory) of ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal). The paper presents a particular research and learning initiative–STTF2013 Summer School ‘Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication’, which served as a testbed for our transdisciplinary, critical and open approach. We address its rationale and main challenges, while also discussing recommendations for other transdisciplinary projects striving to integrate social and technical disciplines in research and innovation.

Shape grammars (SG), which define a set of shapes, are used in applications in the field of Computational Creativity (CC). Computational Creativity can be considered an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that chases the goal of understanding creativity and building computational applications that emulate or support human creativity in Arts and Science. In this context, our aim is to show how SG may provide artists with applications to assist them in the creative process, not only creating solutions but also as a way of creating new ideas. Our objective is to demonstrate how, in architecture, SG can work with rules that will convey legal restrictions, space needs and goals of the architect, creating possible solutions to a project. A wide range of solutions can be tested in computational applications based in SG. These applications can also encourage the architect to go further in his creativity through shape emergence where the conditions are fulfilled and presented as innovative and/or unexpected. Architects obey strict rules when they apply artistic intention to a specific need/objective intention (space building). Thus, our methods are to enumerate SG as a tool for decision-making in architectural projects and to show a set of common phases that may be generated by the use of computational applications in response not only to technical needs but also to creative goals.

This study considers the relationship between the approach to urban planning in Portugal up to the eighteenth century, and the effective process of urbanisation, from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Portuguese urban layout does not develop as a set of random shapes but rather arises from structured thinking by “urban makers” who are firmly grounded in the subject of geometry. Being able to measure the universe and codify it in drawings was one of the major scientific accomplishments of the age of Portuguese discoveries in the sixteenth century and the acquisition of such knowledge demanded a unique ability for abstraction which could not have simply emerged out of nothing. Portugal’s investment in the training of skilled professionals is made evident in treatises, manuals, dissertations, and cartography and iconography works. The interpretation of the ideas of Order and Space in urban design evolved through history in parallel with the evolution of philosophical and scientific thought. In fact, urban space is associated the search of the laws of the nature and the intelligibility of the cosmos.