Dear Robert,
Message from the Chair
These are exciting times at our division as we embark on new initiatives. Over the past eight years, I have seen our division evolve gradually, first as its Secretary/Treasurer, and then as its Vice-Chair. Technology is one of the most rapidly growing sectors. GIS, for example, is exhibiting tremendous potential, as can be garnered from our featured articles. With participatory information being created and shared by the petabytes every day, technology professionals are needed even more to help analyze, map and visualize this constant stream of data, while informing policy decisions.
Participatory Planning Game Brings Diversity and Transparency to Citywide Visioning Process
When it came time to engage citizens in a recent Master Planning process, the City of Lowell, Massachusetts opted for an unorthodox approach: an interactive online game. In order to engage a diverse population, the city partnered with Emerson College researchers to debut a newly developed participatory planning tool for the first time in June 2011.
Call for Nominations (2011-2012)
The division is accepting nominations for the following new Section Chair positions. Please email your nominations to ha...@gisblog.org.
GIS Chair: Responsible for spreading awareness about the application of GIS and mashups.
Social Networking & New Technology Chair: Responsible for spreading awareness about the application of participatory and handheld technologies.
Los Angeles Conference Chair: Responsible for representation at the National Conference. The division will reimburse the registration costs for this chair (Student members only).
Membership Chair: Responsible for increasing membership and fostering mentorship.
All incoming Section Chairs will be required to contribute one article to the division newsletter per year.
New Tool for Involving Stakeholders in Regional Scenario Planning
Scenario planning and alternative futures projects are increasingly popular in the field of planning. Researchers with the University of Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative are developing an approach to multi-community scenario planning that uses stakeholders’ local knowledge to co-develop regional land use models. In our process, citizens and representatives from the public, private, and non-profit sectors work to identify land use suitability and scenario information, which is aggregated using geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical software.
Area Cartograms for Urban Planning Research: Visualizing Data in a H
Planners and planning scholars frequently portray data about different neighborhoods of cities using a choropleth, a map that displays sections in different colors representing a range of values. However, when the population density is high in some neighborhoods, simple choropleths can be deceptive. Areas that are geographically large seem important as they occupy a large portion of the visual field, but they might not actually contain a large number of people or houses. In this common situation a mapmaker has few options to minimize misinterpretation.
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A New Era of Map Mashups Solves Planning Problems
In the spring of 2011, UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning offered a unique course on web-based GIS applications tailored to the needs of planning students. Professor Yoh Kawano, who initiated and taught the course, designed the program to bring out the “coder” in the non-coding planner; ultimately Kawano trained students to create interactive and widely accessible mapping websites for planning problems.
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New Tool Empowers Citizens, Captures Ideas for Better Cities
Too often, community involvement in the planning process can fall into a cycle of distrust and disengagement. Public meetings bring out only a certain segment of the population, and with an unclear agenda, planners have no way to prioritize the scattershot comments of the public. For citizens, meetings are often difficult to attend, intimidating, and offer little hope that an idea will be recorded or acted upon by government. While the public forum remains an important tool for participation, the wired world we all live in allows planners to engage the public in more productive ways.
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GIS Critical for Planning for Urban Growth in Panama
In Panama and throughout Latin America, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has become nearly ubiquitous. The uses of GIS within the planning practice in Panama range from zoning to forestry to watershed management. Despite the country’s small size, over a dozen national agencies currently utilize geo-spatial data in some capacity. To planners in the capital of Panama City, GIS has become an indispensible tool for dealing with pressing issues related to rapid urban growth. In the wake of an unprecedented construction boom since the handover of the Panama Canal in 1999, Panama City has grappled with a host of urban planning issues, including congestion, overburdened infrastructure, and an rapid suburbanization. Though city planners have scrambled to come up with solutions to the most urgent issues, a lot of work remains to be done.
CanVis: Visualization Software for Coastal Communities
Planners of all kinds face a common dilemma: how can we communicate the true importance and impact of change when armed with charts, graphs, and statistics? How can the speaker make his data coalesce into a visual image that will show his audience—not simply tell them—about potential changes? For planners, simulated visual images are usually much more effective than charts and graphs; visualizations are more likely to spur action. A visualization that shows proposed houses, hotels, and docks crowded into a coastal spot treasured for its peacefulness, for instance, brings home a message much more strongly than any statistic can.
Chesterfield County, Virginia Expands Public Access to Geographic Da
Chesterfield County has chosen a strategy of open communication and technology investment to mitigate the effects of the challenging economy. This strategy has ensured the investment in technology returns value and has fostered a partnership with the citizens. Technology projects have been guided by an investment model in Chesterfield County since 2007. Recently the model was changed to place a priority on economic factors of return on investment, citizen services and productivity. All information technology projects are guided by this investment model. It is governed by a steering committee of senior county leaders. This approach removes subjectivity from the approval process, and aligns the investment in technology with the county strategic goals. In addition, Technology initiatives are managed by credentialed and certified professional project managers. All technology investments are managed as part of a portfolio.
Five years ago, as a master’s student in city planning at MIT, I took the course “Gateway to Planning,” MIT’s version of City Planning 101. The only reading I remember today is an essay called “Listening: The Social Policy of Every Day Life” by John Forester, included within Chapter 7 of Planning in the Face of Power. Forester outlines a fundamental difference between listening and hearing:
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