ICA workshop/NordGIScience – Day 5
The fifth and last day of the workshop – scheduled to end 12:00. Thus it was only time for one session and a finalizing keynote.
Session 4-1 was titled Spatial analysis of urban systems which Dafna Fisher-Gewirtzman started off with the presentation Visual analytical tools for environmental and urban systems – the visual openness & visual exposure model in regard to internal space layout and functionality. The research was founded in the field of architecture – and thus presented a slightly new view and applicability of GIScience. In essence what they did was to calculate the view from inside of apartments/houses and to the outer geography termed visual openness (I think). Visual exposure was the opposite – namely the view from outside surroundings to the inside of the building. When visualized and interpreted this gives an indicator of the quality of the building. For residential buildings it is not desirable to have a very large degree of visual exposure e.g. you do not want to live in a glass house next to a busy side walk. However you do want some visual exposure and you definitely want to have a certain degree of visual openness. To calculate both these metrics they had used the spatial geography and the building data. The applicability of this were for this point to inspire architecture and design students – which it worked very good at. One example shown was a “re-design” contest for several residential blocks which were at the lower end at the social scale. Altering the interior, and to some degree the exterior, to consciously affect the visual exposure and openness in a positive way – they found several creative solutions – which seemed to be very promising. However, as noted from the audience, the feasibility of re-designing buildings at this level is not good. The cost would probably be higher than building new buildings from scratch. All in all I found the use of GIScience as a creativity enhancing tool to be very nice – and proves that GIScience is not just an analytical tool for domain experts.
Next presentation was Spatial analysis of the diffusion of photovoltaic installations in private households in Baden-Württemberg, held by Susanne Linder. In essence they calculated the way photovoltaic (solar cells) installations spread throughout a section of Germany and at which time it did. Motivation for this was a new energy law opening for regular households to feed back energy to the power net and thus get compensation for this. I didn’t find the topic particularly interesting – although probably to some degree useful. They relied mostly on Hägerstrand’s theory on spatial diffusion (1967) – which I do not know in detail.
Third out was the presentation Development of a top-down approach to calculate residential space heating demand in Baden-Württemberg. Which followed the trail of the previous presentation. A fairly standard (at least seemed to be) GIS analysis and presentation. Essentially finding the heating (not cooling) demand of residential areas.
This ended the sessions for the workshop. To end of the workshop Jean-Claude Thill held the keynote titled “TBD” (to be decided) – as a “joke”. However the topic covered was his thoughts on differences and similarities between Regional Science and GIScience. Which was ok, but not actually any bombshell to end the workshop on.
And that was it for this time. All in all, I found the summer school and particularly the workshop to be inspiring – at least it is nice to see what others are doing – and how they do it. Of course it is also very nice to meet other people working in more or less the same field – which (unfortunately) do not happen that often in Norway.
