GeoDesign and Planning

By Jason Lally | Published: September 2, 2010

Screenshot from CommunityViz 4.0 (from PlaceWays)

This past January, I had the pleasure of attending the first GeoDesign summit.  I am currently working with the steering committee for next year’s GeoDesign summit and thought it would be appropriate to give a little overview of what GeoDesign is and why it is important.  GeoDesign is something that people have been doing for arguably centuries.  On a basic level, GeoDesign happens whenever someone considers the impact of a design.  That’s a very broad definition and not one that everyone would agree with, but it is also a very loosely defined term at this moment.  Read More »

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PlaceMatters Weekly Blog Roundup: August 28, 2010

By Jacob | Published: August 30, 2010

The National Coalition for Dialogue Deliberation reports on the Portland City Council’s new “Public Involvement Principles.”

Next American City argues that technology in public participation is just a means to an end: you still have to get the process right.

countably infinite reflects on the tension between the notion of planning technologically-based smart, green cities and the organic messiness of how open data and open standards impact city planning in the real world.

In People & Place, Howard Silverman promotes a hybrid expert-public model of civic participation.

Augmented Reality shows off a new augmented reality kiosk application offering tantalizing possibilities for city planning visualization tools.

The Infrastructurist links to a New York Times article on a new University of Oregon “Sustainable Cities” program that taps 600 students in 25 classes to develop an economic development plan for the city of Salem and a plan to connect Salem’s parks with bicycle and pedestrian trails.

The National Charrette Institute makes the case for educating public process participants about complicated issues before the public participation process begins.

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Bicycle Friction

By Jacob | Published: August 25, 2010

Commuters in a bike/bus lane in Milwaukee (Flickr photo by Steven Vance, Creative Commons license).

There is a growing body of research tackling the question of why people choose to ride a bike instead of driving (and vice-versa).  In a sense, the question of whether people will choose to ride boils down to a simple concept: how much friction is involved in the choice to ride versus driving?

Friction can show up in a lot of places.  Is your bike buried in the back of the garage?  How hard is it to find the bike lock, and where is that key, anyway?  What sort of clothes do I have to wear today, and how compatible are they with riding a bike?  How hard is the ride, and how safe or vulnerable will I feel on my bike route?  How hard will I have to look to find a good spot to park my bike, and what are the odds that it gets wet in the rain or stolen while I’ve left it?  If I’m going to sweat on my ride, how easy is it for me to shower and change?

For hard corps bicycle commuters, most of these don’t seem like real barriers . . . the committed riders figure them all out one way or another.  And the non-bike-commuters, because they themselves don’t bike to work or to run errands, often don’t really see or understand the points of friction.  But for people that are on the fence – they could choose to ride a bike sometimes or might just decide it’s not worth the trouble after all – every point of friction is another reason to pick another option.  And even when the friction is perceived rather than real (parking your bike downtown might be a lot easier than parking your car, but you don’t really know where to park your bike and you know the car routine well), it creates just as much of an obstacle.

The challenge, then, for city planners and electeds and cycling promoters, is to find those barriers and nudge them out of the way.

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Online Time: Social Media and Games Win Out Over Email

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: August 24, 2010

Nielson Figure on Internet Research

A new study by Nielson indicates that people are spending an increasing amount of their online time using social media and games, with social media overtaking email via a 43% rise in time spent compared to a year ago.  These dramatic changes mean the ways that we communicate are evolving rapidly, and that decision-making processes and public participation campaigns have to stay on top of communication trends.

PlaceMatters has been helping the City of Albany to use Facebook and Twitter for their Albany 2030 Comprehensive Plan process.  Albany 2030 has 133 Twitter followers and the Facebook site has 382 members. We anticipate these methods of communication, information gathering, and discussion being an increasing part of a multi-media strategy for public engagement processes.

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Facebook understands place matters

By Ken Snyder | Published: August 20, 2010

With the newly unveiled “Places” feature, Facebook looks to catch up with pioneer services like Foursquare  and Gowalla which take advantage of location aware devices, namely smart phones and iPads, to allow people to learn about the whereabouts of their friends and more easily connect in real spaces as well as virtual spaces.

With a touch of a button, smart-phone and 3G iPad users can now alert their Facebook friends that they are at a restaurant, theater, or museum. They can “tag” friends who are there with them and broadcast their location on Facebook.  Given the high percentage of people with Facebook accounts, it will be interesting to see how much this feature gets used and whether it helps people meet face-to-face as much as it has helped people socialize online.

I imagine Facebook will be very proprietary about the data they collect on where people like to meet while using this functionality.  One of the nice things about Twitter is that it allows us data geeks to look for interesting patterns in conversations.  Researchers for instance figured out how to use Twitter data to spot the potential early stages of a flu epidemics by analyzing what people are tweeting in different regions of the country  (while the data does not contain personal data, rough location is known by the cell phone tower receiving the tweets).

I see a trend away from making this data accessible to others since information about how and where people socialize translates into advertising dollars.  It is unfortunate because this same data could be a treasure house of information about how people interact in  their communities and provide us with insight on how to replicate good places and improve bad places.

On the positive side, the more location aware functionality becomes available through Facebook and other social networking tools, the easier it becomes for planners and organizers to spread the word about community initiatives and find creative ways to engage followers in place-based conversations and activities.

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What?! China’s Traffic Straddling Buses

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: August 19, 2010

The Giant Bus! from Discovery News

If China has a gigantic traffic problem, the country also has a gigantic solution: huge elevated buses that traffic can drive under. These are apparently already under construction, and they are mind boggling.  Whether because China’s traffic is so much worse or their willingness to experiment so much greater than their US counterparts, Chinese planners and engineers are potentially creating the next public transit phenomenon.  I will be anxious to see how these buses, straight out of Minority Report, will work.  Their developers claim they could reduce 25 to 30 percent of traffic congestion.

PlaceMatters often employs cutting edge technology in our work, but there is obviously room to be even more creative in how we approach improving decision-making.  These buses are a bit outside the box, but if they work, they could have amazing benefits.  Here at PlaceMatters, and in the sustainable planning world in general, we need to continue to push ourselves to think metaphorically when designing decision-making processes, “well..what if the cars could drive under the bus.”

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Pigeon-eye view of car-free zone in Alkmaar, Netherlands

By Ken Snyder | Published: August 17, 2010

A number of cities in the Netherlands block off large sections of downtown from vehicle traffic during market days.  While on a home exchange in the Netherlands (great way to visit a country and avoid lodging costs BTW), we visited the city Alkmaar on a Saturday.  Roughly a square mile is blocked off from traffic.  This is a video taken at ground level at one of main intersections in town. Lots of bike tires, people, and feet — completely void of the hazards, exhaust, and noise of cars.  A magical place from an unusual perspective.

The following map shows the extent of the car-free zone.

Key:
A. Car-free zone on market day
B. Permanent car-free zone
PlaceMatters Pin: location of video

Pigeon-eye view of Alkmaar, Netherlands.

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Just for fun: City Story

By Jason Lally | Published: August 16, 2010

Just reposting something I saw over at Digital Urban. If you’re like me and miss the heyday of SimCity and urban games, here’s something to cheer you up. City Story is a game for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. And it’s free! Lacks the complexity of SimCity (and that may be okay), but probably a great little game to play on the plane, train or bus.

Download it via the app store.

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This is also cool: Zooming Lamps!

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: August 16, 2010

Pixar-inspired IR Lamp

More potentially useful new technology has been covered by New Scientist’s reporters at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angeles. In my post last week, I highlighted a multitouch 3D table, and this week it’s a zooming Pixar inspired table lamp.  The lamp recognizes its position over the table and zooms into whatever content is below it, using infrared receivers and a small projector, much like PlaceMatters touch technology.

New Scientists also has video of a computer that recognizes its location over a map and provides a 3D image of that area.  This could be extremely useful in public settings where users might want to see a 3D version of proposed alternative scenarios.  It is also likely to be cheaper and easier to create than the 3D touch table!

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