Creating sustainable urban landscape:Mapping with placemaker

The new urban features are not easily identifiable and cannot be easily represented through traditional cartography and tools of representation. In order to explain such new sites and give new terms, several researchers have tested new methodologies, maps, multimedia images, hypertext, software, able to render this complexity and to permit readability. The questions connected to urban methods of analysis that study aspects that are not univocally translatable into objective facts regard in particular three appearances: the scientificity, the updating capability, and the times for the results. In this context, the method of analysis of the Sensitive Relief identifies the elements of the urban landscape which have value for the identification of the places and are able to influence the cultural and sustainable city construction; those new elements and the complexity of those places are represented in a complex map. Starting from those premises, the aim of this work is to propose PlaceMaker, a suitable software to support the Sensitive Relief method. The Sensitive Relief method, conceived since 2001 and continuously elaborated and enriched during the experimentation started in 2002, has investigated urban areas in Europe and beyond which are highly representative of the cities in which they are located, revealing differences and points in common. Those experimentation has motivated the necessity of the software tool PlaceMaker, under development since 2005, able to support the collection and managment of the data, the implementation of the phases of the Sensitive Relief and the construction of the interactive complex map. Furthermore the proposed software connects and communicates the multimedia information contained in the complex map and gives value and significance to those data.