ISPRS Workshop on Service and Application of Spatial Data Infrastructure, XXXVI(4/W6), Oct.14-16, Hangzhou, China 
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STUDY ON THE SYSTEM OF TECHNICAL METHODS 
FOR DIGITAL URBAN PLANNING 
Anrong Dang d *, Huizhen Shi b , Haoying Han c , Lei Wu a 
GIS Lab. Center for Science of Human Settlements, Tsinghua University, 
School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P.R.China 
danrong@tsinghua.edu.cn, wulei_99@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn 
Digital City Division, Institute of Tsinghua Urban Planning & Designing, shihuizhen@tsinghua.org.cn 
c Department of Urban Engineering, Tokyo University, Tokyo, Japan. hawk@ud.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp 
KEY WORDS: Digital Urban Planning, Technical Method, Infonnation Acquisition, Information Process, Information Expression 
ABSTRACT: 
Along with the development of Digital City, traditional urban planning is surely going to be developed to Digital Urban Planning. 
But there is no authoritative definition of Digital Urban Planning till now. Therefore, the essential concept of Digital Urban Planning 
was defined in this paper at the beginning. Based on the concept, the two main contents of Digital Urban Planning, such as physical 
and social planning, and technical and information planning, were discussed briefly. According to the concept and contents, the 
system of technological methods was discussed for Digital Urban Planning. Then, most of the technological methods were addressed 
by means of information acquisition, infonnation process, and information expression. Finally, some conclusions related to Digital 
Urban Planning were summarized. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Digital City is the most popular term in China. Both the 
scholars and officials pay more attention to the research and 
construction of Digital City. Most of the cities have been 
involved into some kinds of Digital City development project. 
Some of them are constructing city information infrastructure, 
while others are developing city spatial data infrastructure and 
management system. City information center or information 
harbor has been established for Digital City services. There is 
no doubt that in the near future, many Digital Cities will be 
constructed based on the city information infrastructure and 
spatial data infrastructure. 
In the future Digital City, most or all the spatial and attribute 
information will be managed by city information center based 
on distributed database management system. Many kinds of 
application management systems will be applied in different 
official departments. Even the ordinary people can access the 
information by means of network and support their daily 
activities which include the work, study, and live. Therefore, the 
current urban planner must facing the challenge of using new 
technology to do urban planning based on the digital city(Dangl, 
2002), which can be expressed as Digital Urban Planning. 
However, how to do the future Digital Urban Planning with 
digital city? What kind of technology need to be applied and 
how to apply? What is the relationship between the current 
tradition urban planning and future digital urban planning? All 
these questions need to be studied at the very beginning. This 
paper focused the questions and discussed three main issues, 
such as the concept, the contents, and technical methods of 
digital urban planning. 
2. CONCEPT OF DIGITAL URBAN PLANNING 
2.1 Literature Reviewing 
Based on the interview of related literature, the item of Digital 
Urban Planning was first come up with the development of 
Digital City in later 2000. Professor Lai Ming, who is one of the 
officials of the Ministry of China Construction, pointed out that 
Digital City supplied totally new way to solve the issues of 
urban planning, managing, constructing, and controlling (Lai, 
2000). At the same time, Professor Ding Lieyun said that the 
concept and method of urban planning need to be changed 
along with the development of digital city (Ding, 2000). These 
ideas are really the basic viewpoints for the appearance of 
Digital Urban Planning. 
Two months later, professor Jian Fengmin published a paper 
titled “from digital earth to digital urban planning (Jian, 2000). 
This is the first appearance of Digital Urban Planning in due 
form. And at the same time, professor Jian explained that the 
item of digital urban planning means to describe the past, 
current, and future spatial shape of city by combining city 
economical, social, and population information together based 
on digital map (Jian, 2000). Obviously, from today’s point of 
view, the concept of digital urban planning worked out by 
professor Jian is not exact and enough. 
The fact is that the concept has been developed during the past 
five years, from 2000 to 2005. In 2001, professor Wu Shuxia 
said that digital urban planning was the combination of theory 
and method of traditional urban planning with new technology 
in the new digital city period. The concept of digital urban 
planning is not only the technology, but also the quantitative 
* Corresponding author. 8610-62783328