3D City Models for Extracting Urban Environmental Quality Indicators in Greater Hyderabad, Telangana

Abstract

With the catapulting urban population in India, cities have transformed into complex and dynamic systems that constitute a significant challenge to urban planning. To enhance the decision-making process in urban planning, a detailed and real-world depiction of these urban spaces is the need of the hour. With the advent of contemporary technologies in tri-dimensional elevation modeling, 3D City modeling has gained prominence in recent times; these tend to serve as the real-world models. 3D city model is a digital representation of the Earth’s surface and its related objects such as building, tree, vegetation, and some man-made feature belonging to urban area. 3D city models are basically a computerized or digital model of a city and contain the graphic representation of buildings and other objects in 2.5 or 3D. Integrating and correlating multiple analysis tools, data types, and data sources is an important step toward increasing the quality of the information content and its acceptance by decision-makers. Systems based on different urban indicators can be used as tools for cities to communicate different environmental risks, and promote strategies and measures of sustainable urban development. Urban indicators are efficient tools designed to simplify, quantify, and communicate relevant information for land planners. Since urban data has a strong spatial representation, one can use geographical data as the basis for constructing information regarding urban environments.