The automated generation of interactive 3D cities is a critical challenge with broad applications in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and embodied intelligence. While recent advances in generative models and procedural techniques have improved the realism of city generation, existing methods often struggle with high-fidelity asset creation, controllability, and manipulation. In this work, we introduce CityGenAgent, a natural language-driven framework for hierarchical procedural generation of high-quality 3D cities. Our approach decomposes city generation into two interpretable components, Block Program and Building Program. To ensure structural correctness and semantic alignment, we adopt a two-stage learning strategy: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). We train BlockGen and BuildingGen to generate valid programs that adhere to schema constraints, including non-self-intersecting polygons and complete fields; (2) Reinforcement Learning (RL). We design Spatial Alignment Reward to enhance spatial reasoning ability and Visual Consistency Reward to bridge the gap between textual descriptions and the visual modality. Benefiting from the programs and the models' generalization, CityGenAgent supports natural language editing and manipulation. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate superior semantic alignment, visual quality, and controllability compared to existing methods, establishing a robust foundation for scalable 3D city generation.
Rapid demographic change and the ongoing process of dechurching are bringing about significant transformations in Germany’s sacred building landscape. Strategies for managing churches no longer in regular liturgical use vary considerably. In some locations, buildings are quickly disposed of, sold, or demolished, whereas in others efforts are made to reuse them in ways that remain as close as possible to their original function. This applies to both Catholic and Protestant churches. As former parishes are merged into larger pastoral units, individual buildings are often assigned specialised functions: children’s church, youth church, city church, book church, cultural church, vespers church, ecumenical church, columbarium church, to name but a few. These adaptations are sometimes accompanied by substantial architectural interventions, and sometimes not. Churches frequently combine multiple uses under a single roof. Hybrid use opens the church to the urban environment, which benefits from its prominent location. Conversely, the community gains from shared use by other organisations and groups, both financially and socially. From a theological perspective, this represents an opportunity for a new mode of being in the world in the era of the post-popular church.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
This paper focuses on the challenge of interactively modeling street networks. In this work, we extend the simple fractal model, which is particularly useful for describing small cities or individual districts, by constructing random cities based on a tiling structure over which hyperfractals are distributed. This approach enables the connection of multiple hyperfractal districts, providing a more comprehensive urban representation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this decomposition can be used to segment a city into distinct districts through fractal analysis. Finally, we present tools for the numerical generation of random cities following this model.
This paper investigates the relationship between smart city initiatives and evolving urbanization trends in the United States. The research addresses the critical issue of rapid urban growth in the U.S. and explores how innovations within the smart city paradigm influence urban development. Utilizing principles from Urban Complexity Theory, this study identifies four key variables relevant to smart cities and their impact on urbanization: smart city technology, government policy, environmental sustainability, and socioeconomic factors. A mixed-method approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, was employed. A web-based survey (n=50) utilizing a five-point Likert scale was conducted among residents of Manhattan, New York, and Capitol Hill, Seattle. Results indicate that the implementation of smart city technologies is significantly associated with shifts in population density, land use diversification, and enhanced infrastructure dynamics. Additionally, residents demonstrated preferences for smart cities based on efficient urban mobility, environmental sustainability, and personal socioeconomic improvements. The findings highlight essential considerations for urban planners, policymakers, and employers. This study concludes that incorporating the identified influential factors into strategic urban planning optimizes city development to better accommodate growing urban populations.
Alexander Krause-Glau, Malte Hansen, Wilhelm Hasselbring
Developers usually use diagrams and source code to jointly discuss and plan software architecture changes. With this poster, we present our on-going work on a novel approach that enables developers to collaboratively use software city visualization to design and plan software architecture changes.
City scene generation has gained significant attention in autonomous driving, smart city development, and traffic simulation. It helps enhance infrastructure planning and monitoring solutions. Existing methods have employed a two-stage process involving city layout generation, typically using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), or Transformers, followed by neural rendering. These techniques often exhibit limited diversity and noticeable artifacts in the rendered city scenes. The rendered scenes lack variety, resembling the training images, resulting in monotonous styles. Additionally, these methods lack planning capabilities, leading to less realistic generated scenes. In this paper, we introduce CityCraft, an innovative framework designed to enhance both the diversity and quality of urban scene generation. Our approach integrates three key stages: initially, a diffusion transformer (DiT) model is deployed to generate diverse and controllable 2D city layouts. Subsequently, a Large Language Model(LLM) is utilized to strategically make land-use plans within these layouts based on user prompts and language guidelines. Based on the generated layout and city plan, we utilize the asset retrieval module and Blender for precise asset placement and scene construction. Furthermore, we contribute two new datasets to the field: 1)CityCraft-OSM dataset including 2D semantic layouts of urban areas, corresponding satellite images, and detailed annotations. 2) CityCraft-Buildings dataset, featuring thousands of diverse, high-quality 3D building assets. CityCraft achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 3D cities.
In today's world, many cities are embracing cutting-edge technology and transforming into "smart cities". These emerging innovations are revolutionizing the standard of living for people, and as a result, smart city infrastructure development has become a major focus for city planners and policymakers worldwide. The goal is to create more livable, sustainable, and efficient urban environments, and software engineering plays a crucial role in achieving this. In this article, we will delve into what makes a city "smart" and what it means for the future. We will explore the software engineering roadmap for smart city infrastructure development, highlighting the goals and challenges that come with this innovative approach to urban planning. Our aim is to provide valuable insights into the importance of software engineering in achieving successful smart city infrastructure development. As cities continue to grow and evolve, it is essential to adopt new technologies that can help us build smarter, more sustainable communities. Smart city initiatives are paving the way for a brighter future, and software engineering is at the forefront of this movement. By understanding the software engineering roadmap for smart city infrastructure development, we can work towards creating more livable, efficient, and sustainable urban environments for generations to come.
Candi bentar is a gate or the main door to enter a specific area, such as temple and palace in Bali. However, in the current situation, it can be found in many entries points to various premises, including a border between areas, a house, and public facilities. Puru Sada Temple, one of Kahyangan Jagat Temples located in Badung Regency of Bali Province, has a candi bentar, which at first glance similar to that of the Wringin Lawang Temple - a legacy of the Majapahit Kingdom of East Java. In terms of scale, however, the size of the Puru Sada Temple’s candi bentar is smaller. The purpose of this study is to discuss the visual characters of candi bentar in places that functioned for worship by taking Puru Sada Temple as its case study. The study used a descriptive qualitative approach. Its analysis is supported by relevant views offered by both Yudoseputro (2008) and Ching (1991). This study finds that intimacy has been a dominant visual character supported by the existence of sacred ornaments that are considered as guarding figures.
Keywords: visual character; candi bentar; gate; Puru Sada Temple
Abstrak
Candi bentar adalah gerbang atau pintu utama dalam memasuki area khusus seperti pura maupun puri di Bali. Namun saat ini candi bentar dapat ditemukan di berbagai tempat seperti perbatasan daerah, rumah tinggal, dan fasilitas umum. Pura Puru Sada termasuk dalam Pura Kahyangan Jagat berlokasi di Badung memiliki candi bentar yang sekilas mirip dengan Gapura Wringin Lawang peninggalan Kerajaan Majapahit di Jawa Timur. Namun ukuran candi bentar Pura Puru Sada lebih kecil. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah membahas karakter visual candi bentar di tempat suci dengan mengambil Pura Puru Sada sebagai studi kasus. Penelitian ini menggunakan pedekatan kualitatif deskriptif. Dianalisa dengan teori relevan yang ditawarkan oleh Yudoseputro (2008) dan Ching (1991). Studi ini menemukan jika intimasi merupakan karakter visual dominan yang didukung dengan adanya ornamen sakral sebagai sosok penjaga.
Kata kunci: karakter visual; candi bentar; gapura; Pura Puru Sada
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Diego Ortega, Javier Rodríguez-Laguna, Elka Korutcheva
Half of the world population resides in cities and urban segregation is becoming a global issue. One of the best known attempts to understand it is the Schelling model, which considers two types of agents that relocate whenever a transfer rule depending on the neighbor distribution is verified. The main aim of the present study is to broaden our understanding of segregated neighborhoods in the city, i.e. ghettos, extending the Schelling model to consider economic aspects and their spatial distribution. To this end we have considered a monetary gap between the two social groups and five types of urban structures, defined by the house pricing city map. The results show that ghetto sizes tend to follow a power law distribution in all the considered cases. For each city framework the interplay between economical aspects and the geometrical features determine the location where ghettos reach their maximum size. The system first steps shape greatly the city's final appearance. Moreover, the segregated population ratios depends largely on the monetary gap and not on the city type, implying that ghettos are able to adapt to different urban frameworks.
Multi-Target Multi-Camera Tracking has a wide range of applications and is the basis for many advanced inferences and predictions. This paper describes our solution to the Track 3 multi-camera vehicle tracking task in 2021 AI City Challenge (AICITY21). This paper proposes a multi-target multi-camera vehicle tracking framework guided by the crossroad zones. The framework includes: (1) Use mature detection and vehicle re-identification models to extract targets and appearance features. (2) Use modified JDETracker (without detection module) to track single-camera vehicles and generate single-camera tracklets. (3) According to the characteristics of the crossroad, the Tracklet Filter Strategy and the Direction Based Temporal Mask are proposed. (4) Propose Sub-clustering in Adjacent Cameras for multi-camera tracklets matching. Through the above techniques, our method obtained an IDF1 score of 0.8095, ranking first on the leaderboard. The code have released: https://github.com/LCFractal/AIC21-MTMC.
Smart cities use technology to improve traffic patterns, energy distribution, air quality and more. The elements of a smart city can also increase the convenience for its citizens, by integrating IT technology into many aspects of citizen interaction such as simplifying access to many of the city services. The fields of healthcare, education, culture, and shopping can all be integrated into the core of a smart city to create an infrastructure that allows citizens to live more conveniently. Actual deployment cases exist in U.S., Europe, Singapore, and South Korea. With this environment, we need to think ahead about cybersecurity and prepare countermeasures as the cyberattacks in a smart city can threaten the lives of its citizens. In this paper, we examine smart city security threats from a multilayered perspective, targeting representative elements that make up a smart city. A summary of attack scenarios and threat countermeasures are also described.
RESUMEN:
Si los italianos son dulces, los españoles somos salaos. La sal como analogía de una idiosincrasia que mezcla lo exótico con el desparpajo propio de los hispanos. En contraposición a la delicadeza del europeo el temperamento español. Aunque sea considerado un tópico, en nuestra música queda reflejado a la perfección ese carácter. La música española es extrovertida, abierta, simpática, sociables, cordial, salada. En los géneros inspirados en la música tradicional más que en aquellos cultivos en la música académica se aprecia ese carácter, y entre ellos, y ahí vamos a centrar nuestra exposición, en las tonadillas, sainetes y entremeses de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII y en nuestro género más internacional, el flamenco. En esta ponencia repasamos aquellos momentos en los que la sal es protagonista y, en la medida de lo posible, expondremos los elementos musicales que podemos considerar salados en los géneros mencionados. Estos contenidos han sido recopilados en los últimos años a través de la investigación en los archivos y bibliotecas que contienen las partituras de estas obras, así como el análisis de los estilos flamencos.
ABSTRACT:
If the Italians are sweet, the Spaniards are salty (salaos). Salt as an analogy of an idiosyncrasy that mixes the exotic with the self-confidence of Hispanics. In contrast to the delicacy of the European, the Spanish temperament. Although it is considered a topic, in our music that character is perfectly reflected. Spanish music is outgoing, open, friendly, sociable, friendly, salty. In the genres inspired by traditional music more than in those crops in academic music, that character is appreciated, and between them. And there we will focus our exhibition, on the tonadillas, saleros and hors d'oeuvres of the second half of the 18th century and on our most international genre, flamenco. In this paper, we review those moments in which salt is the protagonist and, as far as possible, we will present the musical elements that we can consider salty in the aforementioned genres. These contents have been compiled in recent years through research in the archives and libraries that contain the scores of these works, as well as the analysis of flamenco styles.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
We study the distribution of neighborhoods across a set of 12 global cities and find that the distribution of neighborhood sizes follows exponential decay across all cities under consideration. We are able to analytically show that this exponential distribution of neighbourhood sizes is consistent with the observed Zipf's Law for city sizes. We attempt to explain the emergence of exponential decay in neighbourhood size using a model of neighborhood dynamics where migration into and movement within the city are mediated by wealth. We find that, as observed empirically, the model generates exponential decay in neighborhood size distributions for a range of parameter specifications. The use of a comparative wealth-based metric to assess the relative attractiveness of a neighborhood combined with a stringent affordability threshold in mediating movement within the city are found to be necessary conditions for the the emergence of the exponential distribution. While an analytical treatment is difficult due to the globally coupled dynamics, we use a simple two-neighbourhood system to illustrate the precise dynamics yielding equilibrium non-equal neighborhood size distributions.
Daniel Rhoads, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Marta C. González
et al.
In the wake of the pandemic, the inadequacy of urban sidewalks to comply with social distancing remains untackled in academy. Beyond isolated efforts (from sidewalk widenings to car-free Open Streets), there is a need for a large-scale and quantitative strategy for cities to handle the challenges that COVID-19 poses in the use of public space. The main obstacle is a generalized lack of publicly available data on sidewalk infrastructure worldwide, and thus city governments have not yet benefited from a complex systems approach of treating urban sidewalks as networks. Here, we leverage sidewalk geometries from ten cities in three continents, to first analyze sidewalk and roadbed geometries, and find that cities most often present an arrogant distribution of public space: imbalanced and unfair with respect to pedestrians. Then, we connect these geometries to build a sidewalk network --adjacent, but not assimilable to road networks, so fertile in urban science. In a no-intervention scenario, we apply percolation theory to examine whether the sidewalk infrastructure in cities can withstand the tight pandemic social distancing imposed on our streets. The resulting collapse of sidewalk networks, often at widths below three meters, calls for a cautious strategy, taking into account the interdependencies between a city's sidewalk and road networks, as any improvement for pedestrians comes at a cost for motor transport. With notable success, we propose a shared-effort heuristic that delays the sidewalk connectivity breakdown, while preserving the road network's functionality.
In architecture, city planning, visual arts, and other design areas, shapes are often made with points, or with structural representations based on point-sets. Shapes made with points can be understood more generally as finite arrangements formed with elements (i.e. points) of the algebra of shapes $U_i$, for $i = 0$. This paper examines the kind of topology that is applicable to such shapes. From a mathematical standpoint, any "shape made with points" is equivalent to a finite space, so that topology on a shape made with points is no different than topology on a finite space: the study of topological structure naturally coincides with the study of preorder relations on the points of the shape. After establishing this fact, some connections between the topology of shapes made with points and the topology of "point-free" pictorial shapes (when $i > 0$) are discussed and the main differences between the two are summarized.
The dynamics of city's spatial structures are determined by the coupling of functional components (such as restaurants and shops) and human beings within the city. Yet, there still lacks mechanism models to quantify the spatial distribution of functional components. Here, we establish a gradient model to simulate the density curves of multiple types of components based on the equilibria of gravitational and repulsive forces along the urban-rural gradient. The forces from city center to components are determined by both the city's attributes (land rent, population and people's environmental preferences) and the components attributes (supply capacity, product transportability and environmental impacts). The simulation for the distribution curves of 22 types of components on the urban-rural gradient are a good fit for the real-world data in cities. Based on the 4 typical types of components, the model reveals a bottom-up self-organizing mechanism that is, the patterns in city development are determined by the economic, ecological, and social attributes of both cities and components. Based on the mechanism, we predict the distribution curves of many types of components along with the development of cities. The model provides a general tool for analyzing the distribution of objects on the gradients.
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture and climate, almost all cities exhibit two fundamental scaling exponents, one sub-linear and one super-linear that are related. Here we show that based on fundamental fractal geometric relations of cities we derive both exponents and their relation. Sub-linear scaling arises as the ratio of the fractal dimensions of the road network and the distribution of the population in 3D. Super-linear scaling emerges from human interactions that are constrained by the city geometry. We demonstrate the validity of the framework with data on 4750 European cities. We make several testable predictions, including the relation of average height of cities with population size, and that at a critical population size, growth changes from horizontal densification to three-dimensional growth.
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and industrial composition of cities exhibit simple, persistent and monotonic relationships. Theories of economic agglomeration suggest that this regularity is a consequence of interactions between endogenous agglomeration and dispersion forces. This paper reviews the extant formal models that explain the spatial pattern together with the size distribution of cities, and discusses the remaining research questions to be answered in this literature. To obtain results about explicit spatial patterns of cities, a model needs to depart from the most popular two-region and systems-of-cities frameworks in urban and regional economics in which there is no variation in interregional distance. This is one of the major reasons that only few formal models have been proposed in this literature. To draw implications as much as possible from the extant theories, this review involves extensive discussions on the behavior of the many-region extension of these models. The mechanisms that link the spatial pattern of cities and the diversity in city sizes are also discussed in detail.