“How to rebuild a town that only exists in a photo album?”
I worked on recreating the missing town “Poblado de Refinieria“ in Cartagena, Spain. Half of my relatives lived there for more than 20 years, but due to an industrial expansion of the nearby Repsol refinery, it was completely demolished. This project is a non-profit initiative developed purely as a research case, with the intention of creating a workflow that could be helpful to recover its historic memory, with the hope of helping its former surviving inhabitants and their close relatives to have some digital modern evidence that this place once flourished and existed, hosting more than 500 families, which inhabited it for almost 30 years.
AI Based Satelite image
This town was considered a social experiment as explained by Arturo Perez Reverter, who was born here. He recalls living right inside the refinery community, which functioned as a pioneering social experiment housing the families of all the industrial plant workers. He noted that he had a deeply happy and free childhood there, roaming the Mediterranean landscape before the severe industrial expansion and pollution eventually forced the entire settlement to be abandoned and demolished
Using AI to create an aerial photo from a plan
Thanks to AI and photographic retouching tools, I created first an aerial photograph like the one you see above from gathering data from a handful of low-resolution black-and-white aerial images and handmade plans stored in the Historical Archive of Cartagena. This workflow first allowed me to understand the positions of its main equipment buildings and various residential units.
In this town 500 families lived for over 30 years. Around 400 houses where demolished. At its peak, close to 3000 people lived in this area from 1950 until 1990.
This time-lapse animation shows how first the buildings were demolished and the land cleared out to allow the expansion of the oil refinery later. This process took almost 17 years, from 1990 until 2007
Ai Reconstruction
in 3D
With the Help of AI tools, I produced this model of the central church of this village, from just a few images.
A digital twin from 3 photos
Finding good images from the church, useful for a 3D reconstruction, was in fact very complex, but with the help of a multistep process, images were cleaned up and reformatted to be used by AI reconstruction algorithms for its to produce an approximate 3D good at least for artistic visualisation purposes.. From there meshes, facade textures, and normal maps for a more precise rendering
