Decoding the City
In July, the LCAU was invited to lead a workshop at the 10th annual Kosovo Architecture Festival as part of an ongoing research collaboration that aims to improve urban data gathering and bolster the analytical capacity of the local planning, design and architectural community.
The “Decoding the City’’ workshop, led by Niko McGlashan research associate at the LCAU, introduced new ways of collecting and generating urban data. Increasingly new technology and workflows are creating opportunities for architects, urbanists, and end-users to gather their own data in order to better understand the built environment and Decode the City.
The workshop introduced new approaches to urban data collection, including urban photogrammetry modeling and methods to access semi-public datasets. The workflows introduced can be utilized via a standard smartphone and laptop, providing a means to crowdsource urban data for Pristina, Kosovo.
Over two days, ten students studying for their master of architecture degree explored and digitized a neighborhood in Pristina. Students were given the opportunity to use a drone to experiment with an aerial photogrammetry workflow. The students combined their digital model with semi-public urban datasets of the greater Pristina area. Semi-public data is used to describe a source of data that is accessible to the public but limited in the amount of data you can request at a given time; the workshop introduced several ways to overcome these obstacles to create a multi-resolution dataset for the city of Kosovo.
The workshop instructor, Niko McGlashan, concluded:
“While each student was able to generate data for their site of interest, the real potential in this workflow lies in the ability to scale up. With enough people interested, the entire city of Pristina could be crowdsourced, and a digital model could be made publicly available. Doing so would unlock a suite of new ways of analyzing the city, creating new observations and understanding that can lead to better urban development.”
