Contributor Blog

As technology becomes more an integral part of planning and public outreach around planning, the need for a “creative touch” becomes increasingly important. While technology can increase the quality and quantity of public input, it can also diminish the quality of human interaction and creativeness. As we look for technologies that engage citizens, we also need to find ways to utilize art materials, maps and other visuals, and encourage storytelling.

This evening my wife, Beth Conover, will appear on a televised panel discussion on "Immigration and Sustainability" aired on Rocky Mountain PBS's Colorado State of Mind, hosted by Greg Dobbs. The panel includes former Gov. Dick Lamm, former Post columnist Diane Carman, and State Rep. Michael Garcia (D-Aurora). An mp3 of the program is already available at the following link.

For the last couple of years I have been tracking decision support tools that bring audio into the planning process. At our PLACEMATTERS06 conference, Harris Miller Miller & Hanson Inc. (HMMH) demonstrated their suite of acoustical environmental tools for planning, including a simple online soundbuilder enabling visitors to create  different mixes with several sound overlays.

4 tools that support community building at the street level.

Just heard from my co-worker, Chris Haller, who is at Where 2.0 that Google has announced yet another cool tool for visualization. Street View provides panoramic views embedded as an additional view to g-maps. Initially this tool is only available in 5 cities: Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco.

Was able to locate the following YouTube demo. Corny video, but cool technology.

At the PlaceMatters06 fall conference, participants were treated to the first sneak preview of outside.in, a spatially enabled hub for blogs and forums that adds location-based information to online discussions. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of several books including Emergence, and The Ghost Map, and the leading inspiration behind outside.in’s conception, demonstrated the beta site during his keynote session. It created a buzz with conference participants quick to recognize its potential as a tool for encouraging community dialogue and place making.

Chris' last posting is big news!

Imagine a google earth world where millions of enthusiastic users build replicas of their homes and the stores/ buildings in their neighborhood and then they become veiwable by anybody else. Wiki style, people can work collaboratively to improve and constantly update buildings. What would normally cost billions of dollars for 3D design company to make available then become part of a 3D vitual town/yellow pages. And it would be built for free and rapidly.

Like Second Life

Several years ago I was with a group of people who decided to approach the makers of SimCity to see if we could convince them to develop a similar but more credible tool for planners, enabling towns and their residents to look at real planning challenges and experiment with different scenarios in their own community. The response was a solid "no, we're not interested, we're interested in making games.”

Can't blame them, considering the market for gamers is easily a thousand-fold greater than that for serious minded planners (not to mention realistic planning tools need real data to run credible analysis; imaginary cities don't).

Even though I knew this data existed, seeing it spatially displayed so I could easily get the scoop on all my neighbors made me uneasy. Straight from DirectionsMag.com:

Mathew Kane, a doctoral student in the Indiana University School of
Informatics, has generated an interesting Google mashup.

What will be the next public participation technology? Here's one possibility… wireless laptops with electronic ink capability (and built in hand generators to boot!). All packaged to cost less than today's keypad polling devices. Way cool!

1. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
2. http://news.com.com/2300-1044_3-5884639-3.html

Too bad they're not for sale, but I'm sure others will follow.

…here comes Joomla. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of the Content Management System Mambo over the past months. Finally the Developers now left Mambo and started Joomla.

As this article in eWeek points out, "the original owners [Miro], wanted to regain control of the project. The developers, realizing that they were being cut out of executive management, decided to take the code and run…”

The outcomes might describe the state of open source today.

Yes, we are all riding on the hype that Google Maps started, and the endless possibilities it provides. But looking at it from a planners/geographers perspective, are these possibilities really endless?

In the Directions magazine, Adena Schutzenberger points out:

http://www.directionsmag.com/editorials.php?article_id=906

 ... these services (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MSN Earth….) give programmers all the tools they need to make maps. Indeed. It may be time again to explore that age old question: what’s the difference between map making and GIS? The former is about presentation (“a map is a representation of structure, and a structure is a set of elements and the relationships between them”). While paper maps are not interactive, electronic maps may be, but that does not make them components of a GIS. GIS, its proponents argue, is more than just mapping; it’s analysis; it’s exploring what if; it’s using models; it’s developing more intricate visualizations

My colleague, Chris Haller, has done some great research on online mapping tools/techniques that can be used for community planning and community building.  Here's some stuff he discovered on GeoTagging. 

Since Google started its mapping service, based on xml and an API open to everyone, a lot of non-affiliated web applications have been emerging that bring GIS and online mapping closer to “Joe Internetuser”.

Related to Charles' article about google maps and satellite images…

The emerging MemoryMap pool on Flickr, where people annotate maps and photos (frequently taken from google maps) with their memories linked to specific places, takes the Google map service to a new fun level. So why not bring this into the planning process? Maps, like this example here

Take a planning challenge, add some technology and a pinch of public process, mix them just the right, and you have a recipe for good decision making. Orlando County Florida is cooking up such an event- and planners, practitioners, academics and members from all communities will be interested in watching their progress.



Orlando Florida is embarking on a year-long initiative to address economic, environmental, land use, and transportation needs for a 90,000-acre study area in southeast Orange County.

Exciting improvements in planning are possible when GIS tools are used in combination with public participation tools such as keypad polling. During a comprehensive plan update meeting in Hayden Colorado, flip charts were replaced with computerized systems and keypad voting tools to gather resident input on a proposed development and future growth. CommunityViz and GIS were used to analyze the impacts of growth and to create a visualization of what the proposed development would look like in the landscape.

The Sierra Club is using photomontage images online to demonstrate what "smart growth" can look like and feel like http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/community/transformations/index.asp. Several photos show the difference between existing sprawl and potential smart growth solutions.

Photomontage is a visualization technique that is becoming increasingly popular as a tool to demonstrate what the future might look like under different design or build-out scenarios.

The Internet can be a great way to supplement public meetings and get more people to participate in registering their opinions and preferences for planning alternatives. (Of course there are equity issues but that's a discussion for another piece.)



The image below is an example of a question asked on the online visual preference survey used by Midtown Columbus Georgia. Results from the survey, gathered both in public meetings and online, are being used as a foundation for guiding the future planning recommendations for Midtown Columbus.

Here is a neat example of how visualization tools are helping improve the planning process for communities. It's an example we came across while researching tools for a chapter we are writing for the APA.

The City of Vail, Colorado offers an example of 3D visualization tools being used to improve the design review process. The city requires developers to submit a 3D model – preferably a virtual model – for design review. The virtual model is then placed in a 3D model, created by Winston Associates (www.winstonassociates.com), of the mountains, roads and ground plain to make it possible to explore the impacts of new buildings in the context of their surroundings. This technique was beneficial in getting an initially wary community behind a recent affordable housing project. Winston Associates worked with the developers to generate a 3-D model in 3ds max (formerly known as 3D Studio Max) and then placed the housing model into the site model. Using the model they demonstrated how the housing development would look from different vantage points such as the highway. In addition, the model proved to concerned neighbors that the development could not been seen from their homes. The project is currently under construction.

I have been struck lately by the progress of several projects using non-ESRI based GIS planning support systems and how often the decision to move away from ESRI has been that PC based ArcGIS cannot handle the large data sets for real-time scenario analysis.

I just saw a beta demonstration of a wildfire mitigation application developed by the University of Colorado's Planning department that uses a combination of open source GIS, SQL server, and Perl coding to help cities and counties look at alternative growth futures and how they impact fire mitigation.

I recently downloaded and played around with a neat 3D modeling tool called Sketchup. @Last Software's SketchUp is a 3D modeling package intended to be used by architects and designers who need to quickly outline 3D ideas, but don't care for the difficulty of a CAD program, or the advanced features of a high-end 3D modeler.

SketchUp's toolset is fairly simple, offering a Photoshop-like, two-column tool palette. SketchUp has also a very helpful grid guidance system, with multiple colors to guide you through the 3D orientation plans.