All posts by Marc Delgado, PhD
A Breath of Fresh Air
To improve urban air quality monitoring and help keep their citizens healthy, cities around the world are now combining traditional data capture techniques with geospatial technologies. If you happen to be driving or walking around Washington. D.C., this past summer, then there is a good chance that you crossed paths with one of the blue...
Virtual Reality and City Planning
Engaging citizens to participate actively in urban development projects can often be difficult. But rendering designs in 3D city models and transforming them into immersive virtual reality spaces might just do the trick. When it comes to reshaping cities and constructing new structures, modern architects consider public participation an essential part of creating sustainable and...
The Next Big Thing
A string of high-profile bridge failures in recent years has underscored the importance of innovating the way we inspect and assess the condition of our vital civil infrastructure. Can the use of AI help prevent bridge collapses in the future? This award-winning engineer thinks so. The period spanning 1992 to 2014 could just be the...
Low-Code/No-Code Mapping
Location-aware apps can now be created with almost no coding expertise. Is this the next frontier in mobile GIS? When authorities at the Ara Hīkoi Aotearoa, New Zealand’s Walking Access Commission, needed to revamp the country’s web-based maps, they knew that they had to build a handy and more user-friendly alternative for their hiking patrons. ...
Out of Sight; Not Out of Mind
Cities are now creating their own subsurface utility maps to manage their underground assets. But the lack of an open-based geospatial model means that data are often not interoperable. A new mapping standard aims to fix that. In the years since 2004 when a leaking gas pipeline exploded in Ghislenghien, an industrial town in Belgium,...
How Green Is Your City?
As tree-planting efforts take root in cities around the world, urban managers turn to geospatial tools to map and monitor their community’s canopy cover. New Yorkers are fast walkers. But there are those who prefer to take it slow, like the group of well-trained volunteers who purposely roamed around the streets of the Big Apple,...
