Brian McGrath

Digital Modelling for Urban Design is a text book that introduces the powerful technique of digital modelling to a wide audience of students, architects, designers, planners and urban citizens – anyone wishing to be involved in the complex decision-making processes involved in shaping the urban environment. Drawing on two decades of teaching and practising urban design, Brian McGrath explores new theories and technologies of digital modelling to create moving and interactive 3-d drawing situated within the histories of urban theory, design and representation. The book is both theoretical and practical. For the main examples, McGrath draws on his own experience of living and working in three different cities on three different continents: Rome, New York and Bangkok. Analytical discussions of these cities combine historical and abstract knowledge with the ‘ground truth’ of empirical experience. Critical discussions linked to the writing of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Aldo Rossi, Grahame Shane, Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi are linked with the three cities that McGrath knows best. While a rich array of urban studies books have been published over the last thirty years, there is currently no single book like this that brings together urban design theory and new digital technologies in urban information mapping, modelling and 3-d simulation, as a way of understanding how cities transform and differentiate over time.