URBAN MICRO-INFORMATICS A test case for high-resolution urban modelling through aggre- gating public information sources A. BURKE, B. COOREY University of Technology, Sydney, Sydney, Australia Anthony.burke@uts.edu.au, Benjamin.coorey@student.uts.edu.au D. HILL and J. MCDERMOTT dan.hill@arup.com.au, Jason@jasonmcdermott.net Abstract. Our contention is that the city is a rich collection of urban micro-ecologies in continuous formation that include information types outside the traditional boundaries of urban design, city planning, and architecture and their native data ields. This paper discusses working with non-standard urban data types of a highly granular nature, and the analytical possibilities and technical issues associated with their aggregation, through a post professional masters level research studio project run in 2008. Opportunities for novel urban analysis arising from this process are discussed in the context of typical urban planning and analysis systems and locative media practices. This research bought to light speciic technical and conceptual issues arising from the combina- tion of processes including sources of data, data collection methods, data formatting, aggregating and visualisation. The range and nature of publicly available information and its value in an urban analysis context is also explored, linking collective information sites such as Pachube, to local environmental analysis and sensor webs. These are discussed in this paper, toward determining the possibilities for novel understand- ings of the city from a user centric, real-time urban perspective. Keywords. Urban; informatics; processing; ubicomp; visualisation. 1. Introduction Our research tests the possibility of publicly available information sources and the resolution of this data towards novel forms of urban analysis. Our B. Dave, A. I. Li, N. Gu, H.-J. Park (eds.), New Frontiers: Proceedings of the 15th International Confer- ence on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia CAADRIA 2010, 327–336. ©2010, Asso- ciation for Research in Computer-Aided Architectural Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong