Computational Streetscapes

Streetscapes have presented a long-standing interest in many fields. Recently, there has been a resurgence of attention on streetscape issues, catalyzed in large part by computing. Because of computing, there is more understanding, vistas, data, and analysis of and on streetscape phenomena than ever before. This diversity of lenses trained on streetscapes permits us to address long-standing questions, such as how people use information while mobile, how interactions with people and things occur on streets, how we might safeguard crowds, how we can design services to assist pedestrians, and how we could better support special populations as they traverse cities. Amid each of these avenues of inquiry, computing is facilitating new ways of posing these questions, particularly by expanding the scope of what-if exploration that is possible. With assistance from computing, consideration of streetscapes now reaches across scales, from the neurological interactions that form among place cells in the brain up to informatics that afford real-time views of activity over whole urban spaces. For some streetscape phenomena, computing allows us to build realistic but synthetic facsimiles in computation, which can function as artificial laboratories for testing ideas. In this paper, I review the domain science for studying streetscapes from vantages in physics, urban studies, animation and the visual arts, psychology, biology, and behavioral geography. I also review the computational developments shaping streetscape science, with particular emphasis on modeling and simulation as informed by data acquisition and generation, data models, path-planning heuristics, artificial intelligence for navigation and way-finding, timing, synthetic vision, steering routines, kinematics, and geometrical treatment of collision detection and avoidance. I also discuss the implications that the advances in computing streetscapes might have on emerging developments in cyber-physical systems and new developments in urban computing and mobile computing.