Constructing and Reconstructing the City: the Glasgow Experience

This paper describes and illustrates three very different uses of Information and Computing Technology (ICT) to represent, interpret and provide access to the city of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. The first application is a web-based three dimensional model of the city centre comprising the topography of the landform, the road and river networks and around 10,000 individual buildings. The model provides the interface to a number of different databases and search engines help the user explor the city. The second application is a recently completed CD-ROM illustrating, from an aerial perspective, the growth of the city from pre-historic times to the present. It comprises 230 images, 140,000 words of text, 5 video clips and 35 sound clips. The third application is to create a web-based massive archive of images (around 10,000) and historical events, personalities, objects and themes that can be updated and enlarged inexpensively and made available on-line to the widest possible audience