3D Mapping of the Performance of Urban Places

Mapping the dynamics of settlements is a significant task of urban planners and managers who has to analyze the potentials of the place for sustainable development. With the latest advances in GIScience, location technologies and digital displays have changed what maps look like, where we find them and what we do with them. Being one of these techniques, integration of social data with urban physical data has great promises to understand different components of the quality of place. Since measuring the performance of urban places in terms of its quality is a difficult and hard task to do, this paper will identify techniques for measuring the inner neighbourhoods\´ urban quality using GIScience, statistical methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and 3D visualization. The proposed methodology is tested in Montreal\´s inner city because of the significant problems and changes that have occurred in the city over the past two decades. Results of this paper show that \´performance of urban places\´ like other urban phenomena can also be mapped through 3D visualization techniques in GIScience. Such maps can be regarded as the new forms of understanding quality of our environment and thus provide new inputs for the policies to protect and regulate their "heights".