Spatial Street Network and Urban Routes Around the Modernist Boulevard in Bucharest

Abstract

In January/February 2013, in frame of a short-term visit funded by NeDiMAH at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we returned to an older research on the Magheru Boulevard in Bucharest, shaped during the interwar time (1930s) with Modernist buildings. The main outcome of our research concerned the digital representation of urban cultural routes. For this purpose, we designed some such routes for a number of architects, but also for the green spaces. The information about the architects will flow into an online encyclopaedia and thus be a part of a semantic network. The buildings themselves can be detailed in the plan or in the 3D model. In the meantime, the pedestrian route itself can be connected to the street network. We also analysed the street network as a graph, for two purposes. One is the optimisation of the accessibility through Space Syntax for performing the route. Such results can be used for creating similar routes of pre-1755 earthquake Lisbon in another project of us of similar identification of highlights in frame of a 3D city model. Another one is the optimisation of intervention in case of post-earthquake intervention (evacuation, employment of search and rescue teams) since these Modernist buildings are most vulnerable to earthquakes. For the later, we reviewed literature on the topic including agent-based modelling and street network modelling in GIS. Urban intervention in case of earthquakes can be of interest also for semantic networks, since an ontology of it can be developed.