Social Involvement in Urban Planning with Laser Scanning

We will explore the implementation of the scanning process of an entire Mexico City district and the impact that this process represents as a social-decision support tool. Urban planning has a special responsibility to represent societal needs. Using laser scanning technologies with a powerful 3D visualization tool like ReCap software, planners can generate and explain new ideas, and they can get more people involved in the planning phase. Information for urban planning must integrate all possible strategic information coming from different sources. In other words, the information must be accurate and updated and it should represent a high-fidelity 3D model of the city. In addition, when data is coming from different sources, the integration and management of this information plays a vital role for decision-making and urban planning at all levels of the society. In this lecture we will review the advances that laser scanning methods offer in urban planning for a more sustainable built environment.