Modeling and urban morphology with PeopleGrid

Abstract

Urban modeling is one of the ways to understand the city, capturing part of reality and conducting experiments, which can be done in studies on urban morphology. With the increasing use of the internet, popularization and increasing the speed of data transmission, models with online operation represent an interesting alternative, which can bring advances in its popularization, raising participation and integrating with geographic information systems. The purpose of this study is to introduce the PeopleGrid platform, which consists in a tool for asking questions and getting answers about urban aspects based on location, allowing drawing on maps available on the internet, about square cell grids with themes and spatial disaggregation levels decided by the researchers. In urban morphology studies, the platform offers a possibility of making maps through a collaborative process, which may represent collective desires, obtained by the sum of individual opinions. Thus, the PeopleGrid platform captures aspects of reality through partial knowledge of the city that each person owns, valuing subjectivities and building new information, which can be recognized as an intersubjectivity.

Keywords:
Urban modeling; Urban morphology; Collaborative mapping