Web-based participatory mapping technologies are being increasingly harnessed by local governments to crowdsource local knowledge and engage the public in urban planning policies as a means of increasing the transparency and legitimacy of planning processes and decisions. We refer to these technologies as “geoparticipation”. Current innovations are outpacing research into the use of geoparticipation in participatory planning practices. To address this knowledge gap, this paper investigates the objectives of web-based geoparticipation and uses empirical evidence from online survey responses related to 25 urban planning projects in nine countries across three continents (Europe, North America, and Australia). The survey adopts the objectives of the Spectrum for Public Participation that range from information empowerment, with each category specifying promises about how public input is expected to influence decision-making (IAP2, 2018). Our findings show that geoparticipation can leverage a ‘middle-ground’ of citizen participation by facilitating involvement alongside consultation and/or collaboration. This paper constitutes a pilot study as a step toward more robust and replicable empirical studies for cross-country comparisons. Empowerment (or citizen control) is not yet a normative goal or outcome for web-based geoparticipation. Our evidence also suggests that information is pursued alongside other objectives for citizen participation, and therefore functions not as a “low-hanging fruit” as portrayed in the literature, but rather as a core component of higher intensities of participation.

Purpose: The adoption of building information modelling (BIM) in managing built heritage is an exciting prospect, but one that presents complexities additional to those of modern buildings. If challenges can be identified and overcome, the adoption of historic BIM (HBIM) could offer efficiencies in how heritage buildings are managed.Design/methodology/approach: Using Durham Cathedral as a case study, we present the workflows applied to create an asset information model to improve the way this unique UNESCO World Heritage Site is managed, and in doing so, set out the challenges and complexities in achieving an HBIM solution.Findings: This study identifies the need for a better understanding of the distinct needs and context for managing historic assets, and the need for heritage information requirements (HIR) that reflect this.Originality/value: This study presents first-hand findings based on a unique application of BIM at Durham Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The study provides a better understanding of the challenges and drivers of HBIM adoption across the heritage sector and underlines the need for information requirements that are unique to historical buildings/assets to deliver a coherent and relevant HBIM approach.

Memoryscapes presents a detailed case-study of a design-led inquiry concerning the development of immersive experiences to support city-center urban redevelopment, to encourage visiting and touristic activity. Our approach sought to explore how we might make innovative use of local heritage assets, within these digital experiences, to enhance engagement with place. We brought historians, “placemakers”, design-creatives, and technology-developers into dialogue, in a series of co-design sessions (over 9 months, through 6 workshops and with 77 participants). Our initial workshop allowed us to explore and develop extant theories of trajectories and immersive experiences, which led to the development of a design toolkit. The toolkit facilitated further co-design sessions with stakeholder communities. This paper contributes a deepening and nuancing of theory of trajectories by applying it in a specific context, namely heritage-led immersive experiences for use in urban areas; and provides critical reflections on the design toolkit to support interdisciplinary stakeholder development of immersive urban experiences.

The growth of immersive technologies offers new ways in which heritage can be made usable. Virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences are the latest media forms through which historical narratives can be told and heritage experienced. There are many challenges to create experiences which engage users in a meaningful way from the origination stage, through design and content creation to delivery, all of which bring together practitioners from disparate fields. Drawing on the concept of usable pasts, this article examines how disciplinary differences create tensions, challenges and productive outcomes in the generation and design of immersive experiences intending to take heritages out of museums to allow publics to experience them within the built environment. We draw on Brown and Knopp’s approach of productive tensions and colliding epistemologies which helps highlight and understand the constraints and opportunities of cross-disciplinary work in the creation of usable pasts. Through our exploration of how to develop a design methodology for producing heritage-led immersive experiences we argue for the importance of understanding the philosophical approaches used by different stakeholders in the design process, highlight the importance of non-digital technologies and discuss how practical issues can produce ontological clashes.

The increasing development of three-dimensional virtual city models and leadingedge computer software applications is providing innovative possibilities for analyzing the performance of existing city-centre public squares. In the design and assessment of city squares, the use of accurate virtual city models is often limited to visual geometrical assessment alone. There is little evidence that such models are being adapted to carry out urban performance simulations. There are, however, existing and emerging tools that can simulate a number of performance aspects—pedestrian movement, noise level, wind movement, and temperature—that show scope for integrating virtual city models to aid in the assessment of public squares. This paper describes a study which investigates the interoperability of off-the-shelf three-dimensional virtual city models to integrate with selected ‘urban performance’ software to contribute to a more integrated approach to the assessment of existing public squares and the future sustainability of virtual city models. Methodologies for utilising virtual city models within ‘urban performance’ software are established, with results demonstrating that the integration of virtual city model data can aid in both the visual and performance assessment of existing public squares, with scope for application to new proposals. The argument is also made that the application of virtual city models in this manner also contributes towards the sustainability of virtual city models, one that takes a more multifunctional approach. This paper acknowledges that the majority of the evaluated software is not related directly to urban design—indeed, there is no software currently available that brings together all the performance aspects and relates them to geometrical characteristics. However, this study offers a significant contribution to this subject and identifies the need for future research into the evolution of information-rich virtual city models.

Background-Photo-realistic terapixel visualization is computationally intensive and to date there have been no such visualizations of urban digital twins, the few terapixel visualizations that exist have looked towards space rather than earth. Objective-our aims are: creating a scalable cloud supercomputer software architecture for visualization; a photo-realistic terapixel 3D visualization of urban IoT data supporting daily updates; a rigorous evaluation of cloud supercomputing for our application. Method-We migrated the Blender Cycles path tracer to the public cloud within a new software framework designed to scale to petaFLOP performance. Results-we demonstrate we can compute a terapixel visualization in under one hour, the system scaling at 98% efficiency to use 1024 public cloud GPU nodes delivering 14 petaFLOPS. The resulting terapixel image supports interactive browsing of the city and its data at a wide range of sensing scales. Conclusion-The GPU compute resource available in the cloud is greater than anything available on our national supercomputers providing access to globally competitive resources. The direct financial cost of access, compared to procuring and running these systems, was low. The indirect cost, in overcoming teething issues with cloud software development, should reduce significantly over time.