There are a variety of reasons to support the premise that public lighting is beneficial to urban communities. At the same time, a key challenge for the provision of public lighting in informal settlements is their constant physical transformation. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the application of virtual environments (VEs) in lighting planning and policy making. Despite the fact that VEs offer the opportunity to explore an environment by freely navigating through it, including environments that change over time, this feature is rarely taken into account in decision-making processes. A VE-based analysis tool for informal settlement lighting is presented using a case-study street in the informal settlement of Caracolí in Bogotá as its basis. A household survey, spatial measurements, participants’ observations, and luminous intensity distribution curves constituted the main data set for the VE scenarios. Time-related data on the incremental construction of Caracolí’s informal dwellings was collected by the household survey and that data was then projected into past, present, and future night-time scenarios. The lighting quality of these different scenarios was systematically evaluated via lighting calculation software, revealing a variety of shortcomings caused by the current lighting approach. Based on these findings, an alternative lighting approach was developed and re-examined using lighting calculations. Finally, custom game-engine technology and GPU computing were deployed, which allowed for real-time visualisation of the different lighting scenarios and their lighting quality. This setup therefore enables fast iterative feedback loops for current and future lighting policy scenarios and the resulting lighting design. In the first instance, a VE can illustrate well how current lighting policy results in a significant delay of lighting provision in the early stage of a settlement as well as highlighting the mismatch between lighting technology and the built environment during the vertical densification phases. Second, the VE is able to showcase alternative lighting technologies and policy approaches as well as the resulting lighting effects, enabling a visual comparison of different policy scenarios over several decades. In conclusion it will be argued that the dynamic VE technology appears to be a promising decision-making tool for illustrating potential planning and design shortcomings to policy stakeholders in a manner understandable to the layman.
Switzerland’s widely adopted spatial policy rejects the use of new land in favour of promoting the densification of existing buildings or brownfield developments. However, to date there has not been an assessment of the volumetric building reserves that are still available within the current building regulatory framework. This paper addresses this lacuna using a case study of the agglomeration of Lausanne. An automated spatial policy model with particular focus on building density and its volume in residential and mixed-use areas allows for building policy to be quantified, assessed and evaluated on a countrywide scale since it takes the location of the building lot into consideration and cross-references it with the correct building regulation. Three-dimensional comparison allows us to identify whether the maximum volume permitted under the building regulation is greater than the current existing building volume. For the test case, spatial policy model identified 38 hectares of available square metres for densification (‘building surplus’ in the context of existing buildings, either in the form of extending existing buildings or infill development) and 93 hectares of square metres available for new developments (brownfield development of vacant or derelict open land) of residential and mixed-use buildings. At the same time, almost all areas are allocated beyond Lausanne’s inner-city boundaries.
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