Exploring Potentials of GIS Application in Urban Planning and Design from Interdiscipline Viewpoint

GIS can supply large quantitiy of useful information about spacial relationship, consequently there exists great potential of GIS support ing for decision making strategies related to urban design and environmental planning. In different discipline areas there exist different information representation methods and considerations having direct or indirect relationship with spacial information, how to use GIS as a tool for facilitating the work in other discipline field, there are two basic questions crucial to the success of these interdiscipline applications. The first one is interoperatability among GIS and other applications, the second is the paradigm difference between GIS and other domain field regarding problem solving. In this paper, we investigate the spatial information of the urban environment provided in the analyses of the urban visual sustain ability, urban daylighting environment and urban wind environment. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities for cross-disciplinary GIS application regarding the aspect of Information Collection, Information Generation, Information Analysis and Information Visualization.