Each city has its unique urban form. The importance of urban form on sustainable development has been recognized in recent years. Traditionally, air quality modelling in a city is in a mesoscale with grid resolution of kilometers, regardless of its urban form. This paper introduces a GIS-based air quality and noise model system developed to study the built environment of highly compact urban forms. Compared with traditional mesoscale air quality model system, the present model system has a higher spatial resolution down to individual buildings along both sides of the street. Applying the developed model system in the Macao Peninsula with highly compact urban forms, the average spatial resolution of input and output data is as high as 174 receptor points per km². Based on this input/output dataset with a high spatial resolution, this study shows that even the highly compact urban forms can be fragmented into a very small geographic scale of less than 3 km². This is due to the significant temporal variation of urban development. The variation of urban form in each fragment in turn affects air dispersion, traffic condition, and thus air quality and noise in a measurable scale.

Date Published: 5 November 2008
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7144, Geoinformatics 2008 and Joint Conference on GIS and Built Environment: The Built Environment and Its Dynamics, 71441Q (5 November 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.812780

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7144:
Geoinformatics 2008 and Joint Conference on GIS and Built Environment: The Built Environment and Its Dynamics
Lin Liu; Xia Li; Kai Liu; Xinchang Zhang; Xinhao Wang, Editor(s)