CityZoom: a tool for the visualization of the impact of urban regulations

Visualization has been used for many years as an important way of presenting architectural design and projects. However, beyond de-sign, planning urban areas requires the analysis of different factors. Urban regulations are planning tools used to control and/or stimu-late changes in the urban structure and to reproduce a certain level of quality of the urban milieu. Land area, built area, plot rate, aver-age building height, and other important attributes can be easily obtained from the geometric objects in the city model or explicitly asso-ciated to them. This paper presents a system, CityZoom, which integrates several performance tools that allow the simulation of differ-ent attributes related to a planned or existing city. These attributes are shown in different ways either as tables of attribute values esti-mated from model evaluation, or 3D scenarios where the user can navigate and observe realistic shadows and daylighting estimation based on the concept of solar envelope. 1