GeoDesign and Planning

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. 

What the GeoDesign summit is attempting to do is to add some rigor to the definition.  GeoDesign today is often defined by the combination of art and science.  The art is sketching a design or a plan, the science is the modeling and analysis that comes from these sketches.  With today’s computing power and technology, we are able to bring these things together to allow greater collaboration among designers and analysts through faster feedback loops.  CommunityViz is an example of one tool that attempts this marriage.  (Disclaimer: PlaceMatters and PlaceWays share a common history with the Orton Family Foundation).  Those in the planning field often use a tool like this in scenario planning (which arguably falls under the GeoDesign rubric).

Directions Magazine featured an article in July (Making Smart Growth Smarter with GeoDesign) that covers this topic more extensively than I will here.  In this article, they characterize GeoDesign as consisting of four main elements:

• Sketching is the concept of drawing potential designs or plans, usually with approximate parameters and few details. It does not need to be limited to lines and colors; it can include any data changes like putting numbers in tables, changing building heights, or turning on a new power plant. Some planners have always done sketching naturally in their heads; GeoDesign allows them to demonstrate and communicate their ideas even at the earliest stages of invention. With GeoDesign, sketching is often public. It provides a collaborative brainstorming environment.
• Spatially informed models estimate how various systems (environmental, economic, etc.) will respond to the plans suggested by the sketches. These models provide information on both impacts (like costs or water consumption) and change (like population growth rates or development patterns).
• Fast feedback gives near-immediate results from modeling the effects of a sketch. This means that a GeoDesign tool can support collaboration or a brainstorming session.
• Iteration is a hallmark of GeoDesign. You sketch an idea, find out its implications, make adjustments and try again, often many times within a single work session. The freedom to try many alternatives has advantages besides simple speed. For example, it encourages creativity, helps teams work together, and increases understanding of the complex systems that Smart Growth planning addresses.

While not a requirement of GeoDesign, collaboration and participation are increasingly enabled by the tools of GeoDesign.  This is the factor that gets me excited about GeoDesign and is related directly to the work we do here at PlaceMatters.  Into the future, PlaceMatters will be more directly engaged in developing the tools and techniques that help the public and decision makers understand the impacts of planning decisions.  We stand at an exciting time where advances in technology are helping to make planning more relevant to the broader public.  I am excited to be part of this movement.  Now that we’ve named the beast, we can develop a community of people that bring the appropriate tools to the most pressing problems of today.  Join us in that movement!

P.S.  You can also hear our CEO/President, Ken Snyder talk about these topics at Directions Magazine here.