Transformation of the urban morphology under the influence of the new technologies

Abstract

The relationship between static elements (buildings, roads, open spaces) and dynamic activities (movements or stay) has always been an important part of an investigation in urbanism in an attempt to improve urban environments. This study explores new digital methods of the urban morphology and diverse behavioral human patterns in contrast with a traditional method of city-scale empirical analysis of users' engagement. Today, there are a lot of possibilities that the rapid development of new technologies give and with data that are precise and real-time it could facilitate the process of spatial analyses or decision making and could involve more participants. This work aims to explore correlations between human dynamics and the characteristics of urban places: What role does information networks and structures play in the construction of a modern city? What can we learn about cities via the data flows generated by their everyday activities? Can we develop tools to visualize this data to help us improve urban design and management? How can we integrate a dynamic representation of information in buildings and urban spaces? How different are the traditional methods of studying urban forms than modern ones? These questions will be analyzed through the case study - the bicycle system in the city of Barcelona. The results show that new methods still use simple mapping of the traditional urban morphology, but they are upgrading visualization a lot with precise data of the dynamical movements that make it more interactive.