Academic work in conjunction with Liminal Labs, Adriana Giorgis (M.Arch '24), Lauren Gideonse (M.Arch'24), Carmelo Ignaccolo (MIT PhD '24) for Urban Design Studio, MITÂ | Italy, 2022
Italy is facing a rising decline in population and a consequent increase in building vacancy, particularly in remote shrinking villages that are distant from mega urban centers. A lack of administrative capacity curtails the ability of local governments to conduct door to door surveys to identify vacant lots and measure the rate of building decline. This project creates a spatial metric for identifying building abandonment using visual recognitiontechniques and visual indicators, and profiles building occupancy along a spectrum of complete occupation to complete ruination, in order to help local governments in remote villages identify rate of decline and perform triage. It does so by creating a process of crowdsourcing qualitative and quantitative data, creating methods to ground truth the data, and generating ideas regarding abandoned properties through an integrated web platform. This study was conducted using the data gathered from a field visit to Centuripe, Sicily, and with the help of a survey of 50 lots collected by local stakeholders. The project used statistical methods to process quantitative data such as principal component analysis to detect clusters of visual indicators, and further visualized the data using interactive mapping.
More information can be found here: www.revitalisecenturipe.com
Centuripe as captured by handheld Lidar Apps
Pipeline for developing an algorithm and workflow
Web interface with interactive and updating maps
Principal component analysis for measurement validity
Each spatially identified building would further need ground truthing with manual verification
950 points have been collected all over Italy using this method so far - in Lazio, Abruzzo and Sicily | Above pictured - Pettorano Sul Gizio (Abruzzo) abandonment mapping - With Lauren Gideonse and Adriana Giorgis
Credits: Lauren Gideonse and Adriana Giorgis