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In urban planning, both measuring and communicating sustainability are among the most recent concerns. Therefore, the primary emphasis of this thesis concerns establishing metrics and visualization techniques in order to deal with indicators of sustainability.
First, this thesis provides a novel approach for measuring and monitoring two indicators of sustainability - urban sprawl and carbon footprints – at the urban neighborhood scale. By designating different sectors of relevant carbon emissions as well as different household categories, this thesis provides detailed information about carbon emissions in order to estimate impacts of daily consumption decisions and travel behavior by household type. Regarding urban sprawl, a novel gridcell-based indicator model is established, based on different dimensions of urban sprawl.
Second, this thesis presents a three-step-based visualization method, addressing predefined requirements for geovisualizations and visualizing those indicator results, introduced above. This surface-visualization combines advantages from both common GIS representation and three-dimensional representation techniques within the field of urban planning, and is assisted by a web-based graphical user interface which allows for accessing the results by the public.
In addition, by focusing on local neighborhoods, this thesis provides an alternative approach in measuring and visualizing both indicators by utilizing a Neighborhood Relation Diagram (NRD), based on weighted Voronoi diagrams. Thus, the user is able to a) utilize original census data, b) compare direct impacts of indicator results on the neighboring cells, and c) compare both indicators of sustainability visually.
Let rC and rD be two convexdistance funtions in the plane with convex unit balls C and D. Given two points, p and q, we investigate the bisector, B(p,q), of p and q, where distance from p is measured by rC and distance from q by rD. We provide the following results. B(p,q) may consist of many connected components whose precise number can be derived from the intersection of the unit balls, C nd D. The bisector can contain bounded or unbounded 2-dimensional areas. Even more surprising, pieces of the bisector may appear inside the region of all points closer to p than to q. If C and D are convex polygons over m and m vertices, respectively, the bisector B(p,q) can consist of at most min(m,n) connected components which contain at most 2(m+n) vertices altogether. The former bound is tight, the latter is tight up to an additive constant. We also present an optimal O(m+n) time algorithm for computing the bisector.