Open to ridicule

Abstract

As technology affine urban landscape researchers, working in Asian mega cities, we roam through crowded and narrow, widely informal city layouts, where we apply digital fieldwork equipment and conduct design work. We use low cost cameras and camera drones, tools that had been developed as gadgets for outdoor freaks or plaything for nerds. In this paper, we describe recent advances in the development of a method of onsite data and image gathering, which allows the processing of concrete 3D models of informal city spaces. The visual quality of these models is still moderate, but the resulting three-dimensional spatial puzzle makes a widely inaccessible and undocumented piece of city terrain visible, understandable and designable. The software used is free. © 2013, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong, and Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture (CASA), Department of Architecture-NUS, Singapore.