Urban utopia or nightmarish sprawl? Dream city or hell town? What kind of world do you envision? UCLA researchers are creating new ways to explore, research and understand cities – and sharing their visions of the perfect place.

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Forget blueprints and hard-to-understand charts. The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA combines relatively simple 3-D models with aerial photographs and street-level video to create realistic models of neighborhoods. Maneuvering a computer mouse as in a video game, users can “drive” through or “fly” over animated landscapes. The team’s models have already:

Take a virtual tour of the new CNSI building.

• Helped refine the design of the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center
• Tested post-earthquake redevelopment plans in an L.A. neighborhood
• Explored how combining models with sensors can help in real-time emergency response
• Digitally rebuilt ancient Rome in the largest, most complete simulation of a historic city to date

Imagine walking down L.A.’s Temple Street with a hand-held GPS device. As you cross Beaudry Avenue, a flag pops up on the device’s on-screen map. Turns out an earlier user of an online interactive guidebook has “attached” a digital image or a snippet of information to these GPS coordinates. Interested in L.A. history? The on-screen alert could take you to an archival photo of your location and a biography of former L.A. Mayor Prudent Beaudry, the street’s namesake. REMAP is making it happen, but interactive guidebooks are only the tip of the iceberg. <more>

Team UCLA engineering and art students with Disney Imagineers, then charge them with bringing together art, education, history, culture, community and technology in a very traditional venue – a state park. See what happened when Remapping L.A. gave it a shot. <more>

Glass that doesn’t reduce to shards. Inclined tops on vending machines. A clear line of sight down the platform. When security experts get to do the planning, their “environmental design” upgrades make subway cars, trains and stations less tempting targets for terrorists. <more>

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Pouria Abbassi ’89, general manager of the Los Angeles Convention Center, dreams of enormous eco-friendly buildings in a vibrant urban environment. Can his ideas transform the city of the future? <more>

New Orleans after Katrina. The economic decline of Buffalo, NY. UCLA’s Nicholas Entrikin studies how external factors can force us to re-imagine cities – and what that reveals about the importance of “place.” <more>

Will you be ready when disaster strikes? Will help arrive in an emergency, and will there be programs to speed recovery?

When it comes to natural disasters, the ways UCLA fulfills its three-part mission of research, education and service draw sharply into focus:

• Research on mitigating the effects of disasters – from helping hospitals withstand earthquakes to testing water safety after a fire
• Educating future leaders worldwide – on building emergency medical systems and leading post-disaster reconstruction
• Serving the community – with disaster drills, plus tools and information to help people prepare

UCLA has a big hand in preparing communities for emergencies – but you are your family’s “first responder.” Be ready: Read on for instructions on building your own disaster kit.

Deep in the basement of Boelter Hall, on a 40-foot by 60-foot floor, five feet thick, UCLA scientists are simulating the effects of earthquakes on specific buildings – from low-level shaking all the way up to the “Big One.” Their goal? More effective and economical seismic retrofitting for our hospitals. <more>

Wildfires leave behind much more than ashes. Increased amounts of iron, aluminum and mercury accumulate in watershed systems after a fire. UCLA scientists, studying how this adversely affects downstream water supplies, have already put their research to practical use with the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.