Voicing Landscape Experience: Designing Infrastructural Adjacencies from a Grounded Perspective

<p>The master-plan released by Wellington Airport calls for growth. The passenger numbers will grow, the airport will grow, the revenue will grow, the local economy will grow, Wellington will grow. However, Wellington International Airport faces the same need as many other airports before it has; more land.<br>The airport suggests expanding the eastern and western apron, a new international terminal, and a 300m extension to the runway stretching south, further into Lyall Bay. At the time of this work, Wellington Airport has withdrawn its proposal to revise to meet new international aviation guidelines but has made clear it will reapply.<br>A common consensus is that the airport landscape is a generic typology, repeated across the globe, with little regard for the pre-existing conditions. Although this disregard to the on-the-ground is not a phenomenon unique to airports, the vast operational configurations of airports elevates these occurrences' impacts. My fieldwork shows that whilst the imposed infrastructure itself may be generic when it is located in a specific location it produces rich variations of local conditions, experiences and behaviours, which are obscured by the greater imposition and have almost entirely been ignored.<br>Wellington Airport, tied in so closely with the city's urban fabric, is a complex problem. Concerns around the expansion, as they always do, focus on then negative impact on the surrounding context. So as Wellington International Airport looks to become that bit more international, how can these expansions be used for the airport to become that bit more local?<br>Instead of making the airport itself more local, perhaps it is more useful to ask, how can the airport become a contributor to locality? The strangeness and oddity of the infrastructural landscape seem to offer something that can highlight the uniqueness of the locality around the airport edge.<br>To explore this, the edge conditions of Wellington Airport offer a unique opportunity. Its urban location and tight physical constraints provide an obscure yet rich set of edge conditions and the suggested expansions to consider; how could these new edges change?<br>Airport landscapes can often become exaggerated and oversized, partly for the benefit of aerial perspective. This investigation narrows attention to the periphery around the airport. This opens up the ability to test designs at the human scale. These spaces are often considered leftover spaces or industrial wasteland, a by-product of the non-place entity that is the airport.<br>However, to describe these places as leftover seems reductivist and a gross over-simplification of the nuanced experienced that they can offer. Exploring these contrasts provides a useful lens to consider the airport as a possible driver of locality.</p>

Voicing Landscape Experience: Designing Infrastructural Adjacencies from a Grounded Perspective

<p>The master-plan released by Wellington Airport calls for growth. The passenger numbers will grow, the airport will grow, the revenue will grow, the local economy will grow, Wellington will grow. However, Wellington International Airport faces the same need as many other airports before it has; more land.<br>The airport suggests expanding the eastern and western apron, a new international terminal, and a 300m extension to the runway stretching south, further into Lyall Bay. At the time of this work, Wellington Airport has withdrawn its proposal to revise to meet new international aviation guidelines but has made clear it will reapply.<br>A common consensus is that the airport landscape is a generic typology, repeated across the globe, with little regard for the pre-existing conditions. Although this disregard to the on-the-ground is not a phenomenon unique to airports, the vast operational configurations of airports elevates these occurrences' impacts. My fieldwork shows that whilst the imposed infrastructure itself may be generic when it is located in a specific location it produces rich variations of local conditions, experiences and behaviours, which are obscured by the greater imposition and have almost entirely been ignored.<br>Wellington Airport, tied in so closely with the city's urban fabric, is a complex problem. Concerns around the expansion, as they always do, focus on then negative impact on the surrounding context. So as Wellington International Airport looks to become that bit more international, how can these expansions be used for the airport to become that bit more local?<br>Instead of making the airport itself more local, perhaps it is more useful to ask, how can the airport become a contributor to locality? The strangeness and oddity of the infrastructural landscape seem to offer something that can highlight the uniqueness of the locality around the airport edge.<br>To explore this, the edge conditions of Wellington Airport offer a unique opportunity. Its urban location and tight physical constraints provide an obscure yet rich set of edge conditions and the suggested expansions to consider; how could these new edges change?<br>Airport landscapes can often become exaggerated and oversized, partly for the benefit of aerial perspective. This investigation narrows attention to the periphery around the airport. This opens up the ability to test designs at the human scale. These spaces are often considered leftover spaces or industrial wasteland, a by-product of the non-place entity that is the airport.<br>However, to describe these places as leftover seems reductivist and a gross over-simplification of the nuanced experienced that they can offer. Exploring these contrasts provides a useful lens to consider the airport as a possible driver of locality.</p>

Growing Value: Describing The Nature Of The Relationship Between Street-Level Greenery and Housing Prices in Toronto

The role of urban forestry has become increasingly important in the context of sustainability, both from an environmental context, and from a developmental context. Greenery in an urban environment has demonstrable implications for health, air quality, aesthetics, and land value, as described broadly across the literature. Until recently, studies on green urban canopies and housing prices have been limited in their methodology by using aerial-perspective data. The MIT Senseable City Lab in 2015 developed the Treepedia project, which uses Google Street View images to quantify greenery levels in urban environments. Using the green view index (GVI) data from the Treepedia project, street-level greenery densities were compared against housing prices across Toronto. Models for different property types, accounting for characteristic, locational, and demographic variables, were estimated. It was determined that a statistically significant relationship between street-level greenery and housing prices exists in Toronto for detached homes, semi-detached homes, row/townhouse units, condo apartments, and condo townhouses.

Growing Value: Describing The Nature Of The Relationship Between Street-Level Greenery and Housing Prices in Toronto

The role of urban forestry has become increasingly important in the context of sustainability, both from an environmental context, and from a developmental context. Greenery in an urban environment has demonstrable implications for health, air quality, aesthetics, and land value, as described broadly across the literature. Until recently, studies on green urban canopies and housing prices have been limited in their methodology by using aerial-perspective data. The MIT Senseable City Lab in 2015 developed the Treepedia project, which uses Google Street View images to quantify greenery levels in urban environments. Using the green view index (GVI) data from the Treepedia project, street-level greenery densities were compared against housing prices across Toronto. Models for different property types, accounting for characteristic, locational, and demographic variables, were estimated. It was determined that a statistically significant relationship between street-level greenery and housing prices exists in Toronto for detached homes, semi-detached homes, row/townhouse units, condo apartments, and condo townhouses.

Image Preprocessing for Artistic Robotic Painting

Artistic robotic painting implies creating a picture on canvas according to a brushstroke map preliminarily computed from a source image. To make the painting look closer to the human artwork, the source image should be preprocessed to render the effects usually created by artists. In this paper, we consider three preprocessing effects: aerial perspective, gamut compression and brushstroke coherence. We propose an algorithm for aerial perspective amplification based on principles of light scattering using a depth map, an algorithm for gamut compression using nonlinear hue transformation and an algorithm for image gradient filtering for obtaining a well-coherent brushstroke map with a reduced number of brushstrokes, required for practical robotic painting. The described algorithms allow interactive image correction and make the final rendering look closer to a manually painted artwork. To illustrate our proposals, we render several test images on a computer and paint a monochromatic image on canvas with a painting robot.

Seamless integration of above- and under-canopy unmanned aerial vehicle laser scanning for forest investigation

Background Current automated forest investigation is facing a dilemma over how to achieve high tree- and plot-level completeness while maintaining a high cost and labor efficiency. This study tackles the challenge by exploring a new concept that enables an efficient fusion of aerial and terrestrial perspectives for digitizing and characterizing individual trees in forests through an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that flies above and under canopies in a single operation. The advantage of such concept is that the aerial perspective from the above-canopy UAV and the terrestrial perspective from the under-canopy UAV can be seamlessly integrated in one flight, thus grants the access to simultaneous high completeness, high efficiency, and low cost. Results In the experiment, an approximately 0.5 ha forest was covered in ca. 10 min from takeoff to landing. The GNSS-IMU based positioning supports a geometric accuracy of the produced point cloud that is equivalent to that of the mobile mapping systems, which leads to a 2–4 cm RMSE of the diameter at the breast height estimates, and a 4–7 cm RMSE of the stem curve estimates. Conclusions Results of the experiment suggested that the integrated flight is capable of combining the high completeness of upper canopies from the above-canopy perspective and the high completeness of stems from the terrestrial perspective. Thus, it is a solution to combine the advantages of the terrestrial static, the mobile, and the above-canopy UAV observations, which is a promising step forward to achieve a fully autonomous in situ forest inventory. Future studies should be aimed to further improve the platform positioning, and to automatize the UAV operation.

Quantifying Waterfowl Numbers: Comparison of Drone and Ground-Based Survey Methods for Surveying Waterfowl on Artificial Waterbodies

Drones are becoming a common method for surveying wildlife as they offer an aerial perspective of the landscape. For waterbirds in particular, drones can overcome challenges associated with surveying locations not accessible on foot. With the rapid uptake of drone technology for bird surveys, there is a need to compare and calibrate new technologies with existing survey methods. We compared waterfowl counts derived from ground- and drone-based survey methods. We sought to determine if group size and waterbody size influenced the difference between counts of non-nesting waterfowl and if detection of species varied between survey methods. Surveys of waterfowl were carried out at constructed irrigation dams and wastewater treatment ponds throughout the Riverina region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Data were analyzed using Bayesian multilevel models (BMLM) with weakly informative priors. Overall, drone-derived counts of waterfowl were greater (+36%) than ground counts using a spotting scope (β_ground= 0.64 [0.62–0.66], (R2 = 0.973)). Ground counts also tended to underestimate the size of groups. Waterbody size had an effect on comparative counts, with ground counts being proportionally less than drone counts (mean = 0.74). The number of species identified in each waterbody type was similar regardless of survey method. Drone-derived counts are more accurate compared to traditional ground counts, but drones do have some drawbacks including initial equipment costs and time-consuming image or photo processing. Future surveys should consider using drones for more accurately surveying waterbirds, especially when large groups of birds are present on larger waterbodies.