Doug Walker: CommunityViz and Community Engagement

Last week I visited with Doug Walker at the Boulder headquarters of Placeways, an organization best known for its remarkable CommunityViz software. Doug offered a walk-through of the CommunityViz package

If you don’t know CommunityViz, my chat with Doug is worth a watch . . . this is seriously amazing software that helps communities and community members understand what different land use scenarios might actually look like in three dimensions. It also helps them analyze and compare the impacts (good and bad) of all the options. It operates in real-time, and allows on-the-fly changes to land use scenarios, growth assumptions, and all sort of other factors that shape how a community changes over time. If you want to see how your town changes if that parcel is zoned medium density instead of high density, you click a button and compare the results. If you think average fuel efficiency is going to increase to 30 mpg instead of 29 mpg, you move a slider and can instantly review all of the implications for vehicle-miles-traveled, greenhouse gas emissions, and other factors.

Doug also offers some thoughts about where these types of visualization tools are headed, and geodesign – the “flat people” (GIS people) coming together with the “up and down people” (CAD and architecture and design) – is at the top of the list.