Visibility

Visibility metrics assess how enclosed or open the street environment is at each point in the network, based on the surrounding built form. These metrics are useful for understanding the spatial experience of streets and evaluating urban design qualities such as enclosure and openness.

cityseer computes visibility by casting rays from each network node and measuring how far they travel before hitting a building or obstruction. The results characterise the visual field experienced from the street.

Requires cityseer version 4.21.4 or later.

Tip

These examples assume a prepared network. See Network Preparation for setup.

Visibility from OSM data

Calculate visibility metrics using building footprints downloaded from OpenStreetMap via bounding box coordinates.

Notebook

Visibility from geopandas data

Calculate visibility metrics from building footprints loaded as a geopandas GeoDataFrame, for example from a GeoPackage or Shapefile.

Notebook

Visibility from raster data

Calculate visibility metrics from a raster file, such as a GeoTIFF. This permits blending building footprints with DEM data to take terrain elevation into account.

Notebook