Catches, kills and eats
(work in progress...)
Carcará is a plugin composed of a set of user objects that seeks to bring to the Grasshopper 3D environment some functionalities of communication with relational databases and translation of georeferenced data into useful formats for use in the platform. It is the result of a research developed by **LED - Digital Experience Lab** of the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism, and Design of the Federal University of Ceará, in Brazil.
This is the shortest explanation we can give you. If you are satisfied with it, skip to section Tools. If not, buckle up, because we have a long explanation as well...
Well, it has long been discussed how digital-based technologies bring about significant changes in the practice of Architecture and Urbanism, whether in the stages of conception, development, or materialization of projects. In Architecture, a well-established field is that of Building Information Modeling (BIM), whose discussions underpin the structure of a number of computational applications focused on the digital representation of built objects, reaching a certain consensus on how to do this.
In the scope of Urbanism, however, the transposition of something similar, a City Information Model (CIM), is a task that presents a number of distinct proposals, still not reaching total convergence. Among the possibilities, we see works that establish a comparison between CityGML and IFC standards and the defense of a compatibilization between both, either by expanding the IFC model to the representation of urban elements and infrastructures (AMORIM, 2016; CORRÊA; SANTOS, 2015), or by creating a conversion methodology based on their similarities (EL MEKAWY; ÖSTMAN; SHAHZAD, 2011; ISIKDAG; ZLATANOVA, 2009; XU et al, 2014), the suggestion of CIM as an expansion of BIM for urban infrastructure design (AMORIM, 2015, 2016), the idea that CIM can be achieved by joining several BIM models into a highly detailed three-dimensional city model (ALMEIDA; ANDRADE, 2016; CORRÊA; SANTOS, 2015; KHEMLANI, 2005), and the investigation of relationships between the CIM concept and the Smart City concept (AMORIM, 2015, 2016; CORRÊA; SANTOS, 2015).
All these approximations between BIM and CIM are extremely interesting and valid as a technical exploration. However, one should pay attention to the fact that the differences between "building" and "city" are beyond a simple change of physical scale. From an ontological (in the philosophical sense) point of view, the change shows itself in the scale of complexity of the system, which has repercussions on its representation. A building, as a system, has aggregates such as beams, columns, walls, frames, water pipes, manholes, electrical pipes, circuit breakers, etc., which maintain specific relations among themselves. In the set of aggregates and relations one can observe completeness (subsystems of architecture, structure, hydraulic installation, electrical installation are formed), functionality (with the emergence of specific properties such as shelter, stability and water and electricity supply) and the emergence of a general shared property, which is the building itself, of which one can say, adopting a classical conceptualization, has beauty, sustains itself and serves a purpose. Its structure (the evolutionary parameter called "structure") tends to be stable over time, exhibiting constant connectivity relations.
At the city scale, however, aggregates differ in all aspects of their composition. They are more numerous, more diverse, carry a greater amount of information, and have greater entropy. They include not only buildings and other physical structures (such as roads, bridges, facilities, and furniture), but also abstract elements such as administrative boundaries and restriction zones, not to mention the inhabitants themselves. These aggregates establish topological, but also economic, political, and social relationships among themselves. The structure of these relationships, especially in contemporary cities, is changing, with weaker and more numerous connectivity links (ASCHER, 2010). Thus, we understand that the conception of a City Information Model is not solved simply by the extension of the BIM ontology, but by the creation of a new ontology, focused on the management of other types of processes and based on other methods of representation.