Human geomatics, analogous to humanistic geography—with origins relating to the works of Yi Fu Tuan [1]—introduces a qualitative description of human activities, including perception and emotions, into the general concept of geomatics, which developed as a qualitative method of describing the phenomena of the physical world. Urban design, from its perceptual, visual, social and functional perspective [2], has a substantial interest in capturing human responses and activities. The tradition of basing decisions on reasoning dates back to the time of Aristotle [3,4]. Between 1847 and 1857, during the design process of Barcelona's Eixample, Ildefons Cerdà, considered to be the founder of contemporary urbanism, gathered a set of statistical data covering demography, education and life standards, but also such factors as carriage transport and parameters describing the physical structure, including: construction intensity, impermeability and city facilities, such as infrastructure, lighting systems and paving [5]. Considerable research, covering the use of geomatics in describing human activities and perception, has been conducted by a number of analysts and teams, with the most important studies developed by: (1) the Space Syntax group, e.g., the Cityware project UK [6] and several projects using methodology provided by Space Syntax [7,8] all over the world [9]; (2) MIT SENSEable City Lab [10], among others the Real-time city data project [11,12,13]; (3) Urban Informatics Research Lab, QUT [14]; and (4) Architectural League of NY, i.e.,: Sentient City [15]. These projects concentrate mostly on the modeling of human activities, although the issues of perception and human reactions to the environment also constitute an attractive subject for studies, e.g. [16,17].

In this context, the mapping of non-material phenomena is nothing new. Maps of social group distribution, such as the location of poverty or ethnic groups in the city, are a common tool for urban analyses, introduced by the Chicago sociological school [18]. However, the possibility of overlaying them with other data, describing different phenomena, as well as the ease with which such juxtapositions may be converted into manageable information, provide a useful tool for contemporary urban planners in influencing a powerful discourse, focusing on a successful and legitimate vision of the future in diverse social environments. The recent IT potential, enabling mapping of numeric data, including tweeting or SMS intensity, provides additional opportunities for visualizing human activities [10,11,12,13], formerly restricted to traffic simulation and statistics. As the contemporary city is partly extended into virtuality [19,20,21], research should also include this perspective, and perceive the city, both as a platform of mutual communication and a set of phenomena, which require description.

Contemporary urban planning makes extensive use of evidence-based methodology [22]. The philosophical basis for communicative planning theory derives from the concept of communicative action by Jürgen Habermas [23]. According to this theory, the validity of a norm may be justified in a dialectic process between proponents of different approaches. ‘Normative rightness’ results from mutual understanding achieved in the argument process [24]. “The power of dominant discourses,” as Healey [23], argues that presenting the assumptions of the institutionalist theory of spatial planning may be challenged in dialogue, “through the power of knowledgeable, reflective discourse, through good arguments (...)”, in order to achieve consensus by taking into account the arguments and at the same time respecting differences. Human geomatics—the mapping of the invisible aspects of the city—adds an important perspective to the debate on the form and functioning of the urban settings.

As Lynch [25] admits: “In the development of an image, education will be quite as important as the reshaping of what is seen. Indeed, they together form a circular, or hopefully a spiral, process: visual education impelling the citizen to act upon his visual world, and this action causing him to see even more accurately. A highly-developed art of urban design is linked to the creation of a critical and attentive audience. If art and audience grow together, then our cities will be a source of daily enjoyment to millions of their inhabitants”. “Words, words, words, I’m sick of words!” states Lisa Doolittle in My Fair Lady, after Tollitt P. [26]. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” says an ancient Chinese proverb. We may find similar conclusions in the work of Mintzberg, Westley [27] regarding the decision-making process. Thus, the ability to successfully observe, analyze and then convert gathered data into a comprehensible presentation is one of key skills to be gained by architecture and urbanism students.

The paper includes two case studies developed by students of Architecture for the Society of Knowledge, a Master of Sciences degree program in Architecture and Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw University of Technology, and realized as a research work within the course entitled: ‘GIS basics-parametric description of urban space’. Each study describes different immaterial phenomena, which occur in the city, and looks for their relation with the physical city structure. The methodology for each study was different. One of them—the City Tagging project—adopted crowd-sourcing as a data gathering tool. The study describing the ethnic structure of central Brussels provides analyses based on the GIS municipal data. Also, the detailed methodology adopted both for the research and for the presentation was different in each case.

The “abstract forces (urban phenomena) shaping urban life” may be rendered “artistically, spatially and informatively in the form of alternative ‘maps’ which represent urban dynamics (...)” [28]. The research for inspiration included both current mash-ups web-sites [29,30,31,32], as well as theoretical background: the work of Batty et al. [33,34], and other papers from CASA, papers by eCAADe, and many others, e.g.,: [35,36,37]. The course concentrated on the mapping of phenomena other than the physical structure, although the structure as such served as a frame of reference and the relations between the invisible and the physical remained the objective of the final studies, which concentrated on the research for the most appropriate “language of form”, able to capture “in a geometric web, such varied and dynamic human and natural elements” and allowing the retention of the “surcharge of information that can be intuited or ‘read’ by people whose history and emotional and intellectual background make such information accessible to them”. [37].

Brussels is a shrinking city with strong social polarization. The borders between the neighborhoods occupied by different ethnic groups are clearly defined in the urban structure along the edge of the Charleroi Canal. The divisions date from the 1940s, following the terminology by Kesteloot [38]: they were formed in the Fordist and strengthened in Post-Fordist period. The disjuncture between both parts of the city prompts the question of the role of the architect in the social stimulation process. The research was supposed to provide a set of data for architectural design assessment.

Sensor network deployments in cities are assumed to increase dramatically within the coming decade, according to SENSEable City Lab [11]. This forecast, based mainly on the drastic price reduction of the sensor network components, fosters hope of creating a global centralized pervasive sensing network, which might be able to monitor urban environment in real time. Such a network might enable understanding and a re-design of the urban environment [40].

The growing interest in environmental and ecological issues within cities requires real time monitoring capable of visualizing the impact of municipal decisions on the community. SENSEable City Lab goes even further with their concept of WikiCity, which interprets the city as a “control system”, where the physical environment remains connected with digital space [41]. Ubiquitous sensor networks creating a digital representation of the real world can establish this connection between the physical and the digital. Moreover, these sensors introduce the possibility of a feedback loop, as they can not only view and analyze the city as a functional entity, but can also influence urban processes in real time by coupling them with decision support mechanisms, location-based services (LBS) or other spatial-temporal technologies.

Therefore, there is a huge potential in creating pervasive urban sensing networks, based not on the top-down approach of the global network of urban sensors, but on a volunteered network of personal devices. Currently, mobile smart phones are already used as ubiquitous personal information devices to co-ordinate and adjust our plans on-the-fly and at a distance by receiving up-to-date information on our environment. Moreover, people are producing geo-localized information by using various social services, such as Facebook or Twitter. Such information could be used not only to monitor the city environment in real time, but also to create a feedback loop between the city management and citizens. Urban Informatics Lab developed an iPhone application FixVegas, which allows the sending offix-o-gram requests directly to Brisbane City Council [42]. Thanks to this application, citizens can take a photo of the problem and submit it directly to the Council along with the coordinates of the reported issue. Residents can save time and get more involved in their city development without having to phone the Council or write to them.

The City Tagging project is a research of exploratory character, which focuses on possibilities of using a similar approach for collecting sensory data about city space. The research was made with the use of commonly accessible tools, allowing quantitative measurement of urban environment stimuli, correlated with human response [43,44].

The two case studies assumed overlapping analyses of different urban phenomena, including the description of the physical structure of the city, social factors and the parameters describing city functioning. The methodology allows for understanding the reasons of processes which take place in the city, and thus enhances the ability to find appropriate solutions. The results may support potential urban interventions at the municipal scale, with the aim of improving the image of the city, and to advance the quality of urban space and thus urban life, enhancing management and planning efficiency, dynamism, and the precision of interventions.

The Brussels case shows the importance of an edge, following the Lynch’s terminology [25], in the city structure, both in physical and in social terms. Recent research [46] proves that concentration of ethnically distinguished groups favors social exclusion. As Wirth stated “the larger, the more densely populated, and the more heterogeneous a community, the more accentuated the characteristics associated with urbanism will be”. [47]. The lack of an intermediate, socially mixed zone fosters separation, thus belonging to the ‘folk society’, following Redfield's terms [48], rather than introducing an urban, more heterogeneous culture. Social exclusion is usually followed by increased crime rates. Use of GIS for examination of social phenomena, such as crime patterns analyses, has been extensively developed with regard to the aggregation methodology [49]. The detailed analyses of crime patterns point at the relation of these phenomena with both qualities of the physical landscape and distribution of social patterns [50,51]. The latest research on distinguished social group allocation in cities [52,53] confirms Wirth’s and Redfield’s theses [47,48] concerning the presence of heterogeneous, urban specific transition zones between ethnic groups, instead of distinct borders proper for urban communities.

The City Tagging measurements of exploratory character proved the need for a more detailed research study, focusing on the relations between environmental conditions occurring in the city space, which might be highly influential on people’s behavior. The research methodology requires development and the number of measurements must be increased in order to get a linear or surface map with parameters applicable to architectural design. The further development of the crowd-sourcing approach would be of great use in this case. One of the development directions could be the creation of an application for a mobile device, e.g., the iPhone, which would allow many users to gather different types of data at the same time. A freeware application could be used by people as they walk through the city, allowing them to gather many sets of comparable data and create a real network of relations between different factors.

“(...) cities need to be seen as an entity inseparable from its people and their actions. (...) They together produce a city”. [35]. Many different approaches are present in the perception of cities. The shift towards considering the physical form of the urban structures [54,55] and in-depth analyses of city morphology [56,57], instead of restricting structure description to modernist land-use only, as well as the inclusion of sequential analyses of cityscapes [58,59], is parallel to postmodernist philosophy. The search for Aristotle’s city, which should constitute a good place for living, compels urban planners to look for answers in the area of humanist sciences: sociology, human geography, psychology and anthropology, which leads towards the unity of urban sciences [60]. Professionals should be able to include different perspectives in their advocacy of urban planning, in order to understand different approaches and to look for a common platform of communication. Public engagement, achieved through the extended use of crowd-sourcing methodology, provides additional potential in examining human reactions to different environments, and allows the enrichment of scope, both of social analyses or—as could be done in the Brussels case—allows, e.g., for extension of the inventory of unused spaces. Apart of the obvious differences in the research subjects developed under the common umbrella of human-related aspects of urban analysis and design, the two case studies differ in the data used and in the overall accuracy of results. The Brussels case presents the top-down approach and the City Tagging project remains bottom-up.

Every modeling process, as Guhathakurta argues [61], serves to tell a story, and provides evidence in the public reasoning process [22]. Urban modeling allows the presentation of different invisible aspects of the city which influences citizens’ behavior and thus the shape of the city’s physical form. In fulfilling this task, the ability first to observe, and then to transform the observations into analyses, and finally into information presented in a comprehensible, visual form, is enhanced by sophisticated IT tools (mash-ups, crowd-sourcing, different kinds of graphics, volume simulations, videos, etc.). The spectrum of problems which may be tackled is unlimited - as Kempf [35] states: “Ultimately, dealing with the city we need to embrace its emergent nature, its unfolding events and ceaseless encounters that are informed and imagined by many people at a time”.