Visualizing Dynamic Urban Landscapes Collaboration with Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Principal researcher: Dr Decio Rigatti Supervisor: Dr Stephen Read Research to be completed in 2009 A one year pilot project is proposed under the theme of Complex Cities in U-Lab to prepare a collaborative project for the portfolio of the research project Randstad. The pilot project is intended to test the instruments and prepare a proposal for the collaboration between a number of partners interested in the form and spatial organization of contemporary megacity regions around the world. The aim of the main project will be to compare the forms of a number of megacity regions around the world with special attention to the range of centralities and the special character of their uses they support and the relationships between different scales of centrality. The pilot aims to gather and bring together on a GIS platform a number of new methods of modeling and imaging the fine-grained form of contemporary urban regions. It will then test these methods by building a model of a whole metropolitan region (Porto Alegre, Brazil), extending and developing these methods and producing images of the extensive spatial organization at neighborhood, regional and global scales in order to demonstrate the possibilities of the methods and to guide further research. The aims of the pilot project are: • to prepare a proposal for a project to compare megacity regions as movement fabrics and as generators of central places in different parts of the world. • to gather, calibrate and develop on a GIS platform procedures and softwares capable of calculating and making visible the differentials in connective properties of urban fabrics over whole megacity regions. • to test the capabilities of these procedures and softwares by constructing a model of the Porto Alegre region in Brazil. • to test this model against demographic, socioeconomic and land-use and activity data. To develop theories about the effects of complex connective properties on centrality. • to set up a standard procedure and protocol in preparation for compiling a database of GIS models of megacity regions from different parts of the world. These models will be constructed using the same modeling techniques and calculating and visualizing the same parameters for comparison purposes. Expected output of pilot: 1. Proposal for 4 year project comparing the ‘communicative landscapes’ of up to 10 megacity regions 2. 1 paper for 7th Space Syntax Symposium (2009) 3. 1 paper for refereed journal | 
