Frontiere del rilievo urbano: i 3D city models, strumenti di rappresentazione e analisi della città / Frontiers of urban survey: 3D city models, tools for city analysis and representation

If the confidence is daily with the three-dimensional exploration of the built and natural environment, if terms such as GIS and BIM are well known in the field of representation of the territory and the architectural design, the urban scale and the time dimension still pose difficult challenges to professionals and researchers of architecture. The construction of 3D models of the built architecture is a current challenge and 3d city models derived automatically from urban geographic data are still little more than an academic experiment. However, the rapid evolution of the non-contact survey technologies, management software and also the need to show realistic what-if scenarios, highlights the question of their credibility and reliability in the field of urban analysis. The paper is intended to evaluate the potential of these tools and the need to codify the language of representation.