Author Archives: Jason Lally

Scenario planning advocates and practitioners gather to discuss open source and collaboration

By Jason Lally | Published: December 7, 2011

I recently returned from a gathering in Salt Lake convened by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy and Sonoran Institute in concert with partners including us (PlaceMatters), OpenPlans, Fregonese Associates, the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning (our gracious host), and Decision Commons. The agenda was ambitious but the conversations were deep and [...]

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PlaceMatters gets some great press!

By Jason Lally | Published: October 14, 2011

This fall, PlaceMatters is in three publications!  We were part of the Metropolis Technology Issue on page 71 (online link to the article will be available next month).  You can read a brief on community outreach technologies including our own Brainstorm Anywhere.  A more in-depth article on High-Touch/High-Tech Charrettes is in this month’s Planning magazine [...]

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A National Housing and Transportation Affordability Index

By Jason Lally | Published: August 31, 2011

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced yesterday that they’ve awarded a 2 year contract to Manhattan Strategy Group (MSG) and our friends over at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) to develop a national Housing and Transportation  (H+T) Affordability Index.  CNT developed an H+T Affordability Index for 337 Metro regions; this contract [...]

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Esri calls for GeoDesign case studies

By Jason Lally | Published: August 24, 2011

I recently received a request to post a call for case studies from a colleague at Esri, Shannon McElvaney.  The announcement is quoted below.  You can see some an example of our work in Cape Cod written up by Ken here, or watch an interview with Matt Baker on GeoDesign, or take a look at [...]

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A Pattern Language for the Public: Esri Acquires Procedural

By Jason Lally | Published: July 20, 2011

In 1977, Christopher Alexander co-authored the book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings and Construction.  Alexander and his co-authors lay out a series of generative patterns that form a language of solutions and problems in the built environment.  While one can argue about the patterns themselves, the thinking behind this book is what interests me the [...]

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New Spatial Decision Support Portal Available

By Jason Lally | Published: May 23, 2011

The folks at the University of Redlands have announced the latest version of the Spatial Decision Support (SDS) Knowledge Portal.  Working with the SDS Consortiumof which PlaceMatters is a member, they have polished the interface to make the SDS ontology more accessible to users.  The SDS ontology is an expert-driven approach to provide semantic consistency [...]

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Can Games Save the World?

By Jason Lally | Published: May 18, 2011

  Jacob interviewed me earlier in the year about what I’m excited about this year and my basic answer centered around Place-Based Games.  The emergence of social media mashed up with location aware smart phones is enabling new ways to engage citizens in planning and decision making.  Clive Thompson writes in March’s issue of Wired [...]

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Creative Disruptions in Planning: Beers in Beantown Redux

By Jason Lally | Published: April 27, 2011

So it’s been a little over two weeks since our Beers in Beantown un-conference event and in Internet time, that is much too long.  Posted here is the first half of the video (a little over 30 minutes).  The second half will go up when I get my computer back from repair in a week [...]

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Discussion: When Public Participation goes Terribly Wrong

By Jason Lally | Published: April 11, 2011

I really enjoyed our session at APA in Boston.  I don’t have a full post yet for the great questions and war stories shared by folks, but in the interest of getting a discussion going, we would love you to share your own personal stories of hardship in public participation and how you did or [...]

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Matthew Baker of ESRI talks GeoDesign

By Jason Lally | Published: March 21, 2011

While at New Partners for Smart Growth, I had Matthew Baker of ESRI show me a couple of neat tricks for sketch based feedback in ArcGIS.  Using a series of free add-ins and some customizations [link forthcoming], he is able to get some nice feedback directly inside ArcGIS.  He does this using a Wacom DTU [...]

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