Visual prominence vs architectural sensitivity of solar applications in existing urban areas: an experience with web-shared photos

Architectural integration of solar technologies in the built environment is a challenge: one of the key tasks is the identification of homogeneous zones of intervention as a function of the solar energy potential and “criticity”, a combination of the socio-cultural value of the urban context (sensitivity) and the visibility from the public space [1]. This paper explores possible relations between highly sensitive urban areas and their visual prominence in the public interest: a study is performed, as an example, in the city of Geneva. A false-color “heat map” is built through GIS techniques by extracting photo shooting locations from the Flickr public repository, and overlapped on the ISOS Swiss cartography. This method can be used to establish a hierarchy of the viewpoints in the public space.