Ricerc@Sapienza

Lima got a yellow skin, as the etymology of its name seems to suggest (1). The Peruvian capital shows an authentic obsession for this colour: the facades of the monuments and that of the main public buildings (such as the colonial-style Town Hall), the benches, the lighting poles, the buses, the curbs... Everything started from a strategy by Luis Castañeda Lossio, the (controversial) mayor of Lima for three terms (2003- 2018), who promoted a large urban redevelopment project based on the use of yellow as a highly distinctive means of communication (and propaganda).

Urban and rural terms have different significances with reference to the context and their relationship have changed over time according to socio-political changes, always in a dichotomous way. The latest studies overpass this dichotomy and propose multi-sectoral approach focusing on patterns of territorial continuity, which goes beyond boundaries.

In December 2015, as part of an international collaboration agreement between Sapienza University of Rome and the National University of Civil Engineering of Hanoi, the Department of Architecture and Design1 organized a planning workshop involving Italian and Vietnamese professors and students. The workshop, titled Connecting People from two Nations: urban renewal for Hanoi Historical Centre, was held in Hanoi at Casa Italia, in collaboration with the Italian Embassy in Vietnam.

The paper deals with the general presentation of the Urban GEO BIG DATA, a collaborative acentric and distributed Free and Open Source (FOS) platform consisting of several components: local data nodes for data and related service Web deploy; a visualization node for data fruition; a catalog node for data discovery; a CityGML modeler; data-rich viewers based on virtual globes; an INSPIRE metadata management system enriched with quality indicators for each dataset.Three use cases in five Italian cities (Turin, Milan, Padua, Rome, and Naples) are examined: 1) urban mobility; 2) land cover and