Digital Tools Aimed to Represent Urban Survey

Since the affirmation, in the Sixties, of Urban Survey as a discipline in the field of drawing disciplines, it aimed to represent on a plan a set of three-dimensional data. This aim emerged in the European researches carried out by Pierre Lavedan and Augusto Cavallari Murat that triggered a discussion about the values that characterized the historic city, in particular the Baroque one, and the ways in which these values could be represented in a synthetic drawing. In 1974, Cavallari Murat proposed symbols for the survey of historic urban tissues, within the standard UNI 7310-74 - Urban Cartography. Graphic Standards, for representing historical urban tissue mainly characterized by multistory buildings. Digital revolution allows representing urban tissues by 3D models that can collect a lot of information related to the buildings, becoming real data base. Today, these models fulfill the need for update representations of urban settings, aimed both to critical studies on historical city and to manage the ongoing transformations. Moreover, these representations could become the urban scenarios for simulations and checks of master plans and architectural designs in their relationships with the built environment. Several new tools of urban procedural modeling, BIM modeling and web resources allow generating urban 3D models. The authors of this proposal will compare the knowledge and informative capabilities of different new technologies for urban modeling, through an overview of international researches, case studies, and also some experiences personally conducted.