Colour plan for urban design

The aim of this paper is to describe a research project concerning the colour planning in urban environment. The first part draws the research held in cooperation with the urban furniture departement of Milan City Council; the main goal was to collect the chromatic data of urban furniture inside a sample area in the historical centre of Milan and to use virtual reality to evaluate the proposed actions. There are some important issues that deal with colour in urban design: from the practitioners point of view it refers to how to choose a colour and why in submitted projects, and from city managers side how to evaluate different choices. Some issues concern how to choose colour organization, how to describe the shared information and knowledge and how to valuate the consistence of colour projects. Then we have investigated the potential of ontology representation in our application domain. We describe our experiences and considerations using this information technology tool as more expressive than the classic relational database; the goal is to be able to extract from the ontology representation knowledge guidelines and methodologies in order to verify coherence of the projects concerning either urban furniture or public space design.