Urban renewal is one of the main motivations of city regeneration. Urban renewal strategies mainly relate to demolishing old buildings and redeveloping new buildings instead, improving buildings and deteriorated areas, infilling new buildings within existing urban fabric, integrating new communities into old and rolling-down areas, and so on. In parallel to this situation, the modern world is in the wake of the 4th Industrial Revolution, which is characterized by a merger of physical and digital spaces and is consequently affecting cities and their quality of life. Therefore, urban regeneration must take into consideration these digital innovations and harness the emerging technological changes into new development of urban renewal processes and decision-making approaches. This editorial introduces the topic of digital urban regeneration, by discussing possible methodologies and decision-making approaches and presents the thematic issue on "embedding digital technologies into urban renewal processes and development."
The neighborhood renewal process is an important opportunity to update the built environment; however, major changes to the built environment might decrease spatial performance and environmental quality. In these processes, there is a need to evaluate urban renewal alternatives, especially the quality of the environment, to understand the performance of the newly designed built environment. The quality of the built environment depends on a variety of aspects (such as walkability, energy level, security, open spaces, water permeability, etc.), several of which can be assessed using diverse measurements and evaluation models. Current new technological developments, based on GIS, enable the evaluation of diverse aspects of environmental quality and promote urban renewal decision-making processes. Urban renewal needs to harness these models in the decision-making approaches to improve assessment processes of urban renewal alternative estimations that consider future performance and quality of the built environment. In this article, we present a 3D-GIS multiparametric scenario analysis for neighborhood renewal alternatives estimation to evaluate the performance and quality of the built environment as part of the decision-making process. The multiparametric approach will include an evaluation analysis of several aspects of environmental quality, including walkability, accessibility, sense of security, energy, shade, water infiltration, visibility, and more. The analysis results will indicate the level of performance for each aspect as indices for environmental quality. The multiparametric scenario analysis for neighborhood renewal will be conducted on three renewal alternatives for one neighborhood in the city of Hatzor HaGlilit, Israel.In this article, we present a 3D-GIS multiparametric scenario analysis for neighborhood renewal alternatives estimation to evaluate the performance and quality of the built environment as part of the decision-making process. The multiparametric approach will include evaluation analysis of several aspects of the environmental quality, including walkability, accessibility, sense of security, energy, shade, water infiltration, visibility, and more. The analysis results will indicate the level of performance for each aspect, as indices for environmental quality. The multiparametric scenario analysis for neighborhood renewal will be conducted on three renewal alternatives for one neighborhood in the city of Hatzor-HaGlilit, Israel.
