Creating Mashup Maps using Web-Based Tools
Corey Proctor, Technology Division GIS Chair Any member of the general populous can create a map – The myth has been refuted as to whether an individual needs a degree or advanced coursework in Geography. Maps can now be created by novices with Internet access. This access provides users with limitless sources of mapping resources [...]
The Democratization of Big Data
By Robert Goodspeed, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Planning & Technology Today Co-Editor Already a major technology trend, 2012 promises to be a watershed for “big data.” A shorthand term for the proliferation of large datasets, big data also refers to the expansion of analytic techniques for teasing meaning from the vast [...]
New Tool Invites the Public to Balance Transit Agency Budget in Boston
Jessica Robertson, Metropolitan Area Planning Council Planners in Boston are inviting the public to try their hand at balancing the budget of the regional transportation agency through an innovative new website aimed at educating the public on the sometimes-esoteric topic of transportation finance. After a decade of chronic underfunding, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA [...]
Case Study: Planetizen Video Courses
Chris Steins, Urban Insight and former Chair of the APA Technology Division We know that planning professionals are increasingly being asked to get up to speed on new technologies and take on more responsibilities. The goal of Planetizen Courses (courses.planetizen.com) is to provide affordable, focused video courses that can be viewed on a computer, tablet [...]
Perceived Usefulness of Scenario and Visualization Tools for Planning, Design, and Impact Analysis of Development around Transit Stations
Todd Graham, Metropolitan Council Michael D. Greco, University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs David G. Pitt, University of Minnesota Department of Landscape Architecture “Corridors of Opportunity” is an initiative to promote sustainable, vibrant, and healthy communities framed around a transit network in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, metropolitan region. The initiative is funded [...]
Shareabouts: Open Source Maps for Crowdsourcing
Frank Hebbert and Julia West OpenPlans Successful planning projects make the community an equal partner. But it’s not easy – maximizing public participation in the planning process remains one of the biggest challenges for planners. During the initial phases of a new project, how can we learn what matters most to the community? As a [...]
Beautiful Streets: An Experiment in Place Evaluation
Aaron Ogle, Mjumbe Poe and Frank Hebbert OpenPlans What’s a beautiful street? Sometimes it’s hard to define what makes a place great. Planners can track a neighborhood through census data, population density, crime statistics, and so on. But it’s harder to establish the softer feeling – is this a place I like? Beautiful Streets (beautiful.st) [...]
Using Volunteered Geography Information to Improve Transportation Services for Low-Income Communities
Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Hunter College Department of Urban Affairs and Planning How can we understand the travel behaviors and mobility barriers experienced by low-income populations? The answer is both simple and complex at the same time, since it requires considering the entirety of individuals’ lives, not only their travel to and from their workplace. My research [...]
The Urban Network Analysis Toolbox for ArcGIS
Andres Sevtsuk, Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD) The spatial analysis of city environments has come a long way in the past decade. The increasing availability of geographic data and advances in software and computation power have now made computerized spatial analysis tools commonplace in most planning firms and city governments. Despite these advances, [...]
Developing Digital Commons for Cities
David Bollier, Commons Strategies Group There is a little-known struggle going on right now over how a new series of “top level domains” (TLDs) on the Internet shall be used by cities of the world. TLDs are the suffixes at the end of Web addresses, such as .com, .org and .edu. The international body that [...]
Crowdsourcing Urban Form in Moscow
Peter Sigrist, Cornell University Can participation in urban development be open to all citizens online? Andrei Goncharov has devised a model for how this could work. As a student at the new Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Goncharov developed a game prototype called “Crowdsourced Moscow,” which envisions a compelling approach to technology-enabled urban [...]
Viewpoint: Seeking a City of Truth
Alexa Mills, MIT Community Innovators Lab 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 [...]
New Tool Empowers Citizens, Captures Ideas for Better Cities
Jeffrey Goodman, MindMixer.com 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 [...]
A New Era of Map Mashups Solves Planning Problems
Erin Coleman, Dao Doan, Sarah Peters and Madeline Wander, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs 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 [...]
Area Cartograms for Urban Planning Research: Visualizing Data in a High-Density City
Paavo Monkkonen, The University of Hong Kong 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 [...]
New Tool for Involving Stakeholders in Regional Scenario Planning
Michelle L. Johnson and Spencer R. Meyer, University of Maine 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, [...]
Participatory Planning Game Brings Diversity and Transparency to Citywide Visioning Process
Allegra Williams, City of Lowell 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 [...]
Urban Planners and Open Data: Making the Connection
Karen Quinn Fung, University of British Columbia Government organizations around the world are planning or launching open data initiatives. The aim of these initiatives is to make data generated from the provision of government services freely available on the Internet to citizens for analysis, mash-ups, or use by web or mobile applications. The trend is [...]
Keeping Up with Technological Change: A New Core Principle for City and Regional Planning
William D. Schnaufer, AICP City and regional planning has suffered from the lack of a core principle to guide planner’s actions and integrate the profession. By taking a longer view, the dynamic of change – especially as accompanied by rapid technological change – could fill this role. That is not to say there haven’t been [...]
New Technologies for Visualizing Sustainable Planning
Anthony Flint, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Advances in technology are helping revolutionize a key component in planning: engaging citizens in the planning process. The Visualizing section of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy website explores recent computer-based tools for the visual display of long-range, scenario, and regional planning, as well as different forms of [...]
Food Systems and Social Media: How the Taco Truck Went Online
Jennifer Evans-Cowley, PhD, AICP, Chair APA Technology Division Bethia Woolf’s journey to becoming a “food adventure” entrepreneur started with a modest class project. Woolf immigrated to Columbus, Ohio from the United Kingdom and quickly became immersed in the city’s food culture. She sits on the board of Slow Food Columbus and regularly judges local food [...]
H & T Affordability Makes Dollars and Sense
Matthew Sussman, Center for Neighborhood Technology The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a Chicago-based “think and do” tank that has promoted urban sustainability for more than 30 years, has launched a web tool that offers a new and comprehensive way of thinking about the cost of housing. The Housing and Transportation (H+T) Affordability Index reveals [...]
Where are the People? Using Technology to Bring Life Back to our Streets
David Lustberg, Arterial LLC A downtown street without pedestrians and cyclists is like a playground without children: something essential is missing. Streets that are full of life and activity — where commerce, nature, and recreation converge — are the foundation of a successful urban setting. Despite this understanding, many once-vital commercial cores across the United [...]
Targeting At-Risk Populations and Identifying Community Needs Through 2-1-1 Data
By Sherry Bame, Texas A&M University Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved 2-1-1 as a three-digit phone number for non-emergency information and referral, similar to 9-1-1 for emergency needs. Both United Way Worldwide and Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (AIRS) have played leading roles in [...]
