Planning and Decision-Support Tools

Urban Insight
E-government: the top ten technologies

San Diego Section of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA)
URISA is an interdisciplinary society of professionals dedicated to stimulating and encouraging
the effective application of information technology and integration of urban and regional information
for decision making. URISA is an educational association of providers and users of spatial information
in both the public and private sectors.

Informed Regional Choices Report: How California’s Regional Organizations are Applying Planning and Decision Tools. November 2000, the California Center for Regional Leadership (CCRL) published a 45-page report titled Informed Regional Choices. The report examines the use of information technology tools by eight of California's Collaborative Regional Initiatives, and recommendations for establishing CARIT as a statewide intermediary organization.

Planning Reports Center
The Planning Reports Center (PRC) is a free web-based "virtual" directory maintained by the publishers of the Planning Commissioners Journal, the principal national publication for members of town, city, county, and regional planning boards. The PRC allows users to quickly and easily find information describing ways other communities have dealt with important planning issues. It is anticipated that the PRC will become a key destination on the Web for those searching for planning-related information.

The Alliance for Regional Stewardship
The ARS is a national peer-to-peer learning network of regional leaders who benefit by sharing experiences and working collaboratively on innovative approaches to common regional challenges. The Alliance is for proven leaders who recognize the interdependencies of their regions’ economy, environment, and society and are seeking practical ways to effect change. These leaders can come from business, government, education, and community sectors, but they share a common commitment to collaborative action and regional stewardship. Regional Stewards recognize the interdependencies between four spheres: new economy, livable community, social inclusion, and governance. They work across boundaries of jurisdiction, sector, and discipline to connect these four spheres and create opportunities for their region.

Sustainable Development Communications Network is a group of leading non-governmental organizations working together to find ways of using the Internet to meet the goals of sustainable development.

National Community Building Network
NCBN provides a forum for community practitioners, researchers, funders and others engaged in neighborhood transformation to share their common interests, insights into barriers they encounter, and field-tested strategies for rebuilding communities. The Network is also committed to developing tools and building capacity within communities to influence comprehensive community building policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

The State of the Region Report measures, monitors, and proposes goals and action steps for performance in the binational Buffalo-Niagara Region. "You can't manage what you can't measure."

Planning Support Systems Group, Mit Department of Urban Studies and Planning
The Planning Support Systems Group investigates the interplay between information technologies and planning. We concentrate our research on
• The development of suitable spatial information infrastructures to support planning processes,
• Using information technologies to model urban futures and understand urban spatial structure, and
• Evaluating the impact of emerging information technologies on public debate.

The California Center for Regional Leadership (CCRL)
The CCRL is a statewide nonprofit organization established to support, facilitate, and promote innovative regional solutions for our major economic, environmental, and societal challenges, to help achieve a more sustainable California. A new program of CCRL, the California Alliance for Regional Information Technology (CARIT) supports the needs of Collaborative Regional Initiatives in using new information technologies to fulfill their mission. Tools and uses include email and website functions for leadership development and civic engagement; database access and management for Community Indicator projects and other purposes; spatial data and visualization tools for community visioning and planning; groupware software for planning and policy engagement and choice work. CARIT also provides a regional user interface with the "supply" side tool development community, and promotes the effective use of information technology tools by the public sector, to help "democratize" the planning process.

GIS, Spatial Data, and 3D Visualization

Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS)
CSISS recognizes the growing significance of space, spatiality, location, and place in social science research. It seeks to develop unrestricted access to tools and perspectives that will advance the spatial analytic capabilities of researchers throughout the social sciences. CSISS is funded by the National Science Foundation under its program of support for infrastructure in the social and behavioral sciences.

UCSD's GIS Lab
The GIS lab primary purpose is to assist faculty and staff in the utilization of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The lab is located in the second floor, West Wing of the Geisel Library. The lab houses 6 computers for use on project and class GIS assignments with plotting and printing services as well. The lab utilizes a variety of data including but not limited to U.S. Census information, Digital Elevation Models (DEM), transportation (roads, railways, airports), environmental (vegetation communities, species modeling), archeological plots, as well as aerial photography and satellite imagery.

Visualization Center at the Cecil and Ida Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
The Visualization Center located at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego is a state-of-the-art visualization tool for presenting, and manipulating very large datasets.The center employsa wide range of hardware and software to give the user a totally immersive working environment in which to display, analyze, and discuss large datasets.

The Environmental Simulation Center practices urban design and planning as an independent not-for-profit lab and works with cities, towns, regional planning authorities, institutions, real-estate developers, and community-based organizations. It furthers the development of information technology and decision support systems as applied to real-world planning and design projects throughout the United States. The processes and tools the Center develops enable the concept of Just-in-Time Planning™, where the complexity and uncertainty inherent in planning and designing districts, towns, cities, and regions can be captured and modeled. Just-in-Time Planning™ helps move planning from the regulatory/adversarial model to the management/consensus model.

Participatory Avenues aims at sharing significant progress in visualizing people's spatial knowledge (cognitive maps) and in providing communities added stake in tailoring and owning conservation and development initiatives. Participatory 3-Dimensional Modeling is promoted as "best practice".

1996 NCGIA workshop on Public Participation GIS
http://www.ncgia.maine.edu/ppgis/ppgishom.html

1998 Varenius meeting on Empowerment, Marginalization
And Public Participation GIS
http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/varenius/ppgis/ncgia.html

R. Laurini's "Information Systems for Urban Planning."
http://lisi.insa-lyon.fr/~laurini/isup/

Modelling and visualization: Virtual tools for complex problems: an overview of the Atlas NW regional interactive sustainability atlas for planning for sustainable development. by S J Lindley

Social Capital and Quality of Life Indicators

Social Capital for Development (A World Bank Guide)
Led by a growing body of evidence which shows social capital as a potential contributor to poverty reduction and sustainable development, increasing efforts are being made to identify methods and tools relevant to social capital. This is especially challenging because social capital is comprised of concepts such as "trust", "community" and "networks" which are difficult to quantify. The challenge is increased when one considers that the quest is to measure not just the quantity but also the quality of social capital on a variety of scales.The World Bank's Social Capital Website provides a forum for cross-discipline dialogue for clarifying theconceptual framework, measures and development applications related to social capital; facilitate coordination and dissemination of information; stimulate cutting-edge research efforts by linking development practitioners, researchers and policymakers in specific knowledge areas.

Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (NKLA), is creating a new model for the relationship between a university and its community, and redefining the role of urban planners in the information age.

Community Indicator Projects on the Web
Despite the growing number of indicators projects, there has been very little communication among them. In response, Redefining Progress's Community Indicators Project links existing and emerging projects and facilitates the development of community indicators initiatives nationwide through a series of tools, resources, and technical support, including: an e-mail-based discussion group, a database directory including basic information on over 200 community indicators projects around the United States, and the Community Indicators Handbook. The project has also recently organized the California Community Indicators Initiativeto strengthen indicators work in the state. Redefining Progress

The San Diego County Quality of Life program (TELESIS Non-Profit Corporation)
http://www.qolsandiego.net/
As posted on their website, the San Diego County Quality of Life program "is a progressive approach to strategic planning, integration and improvement of client centered services. The Quality of Life (QOL) concept is linked directly to the new role community collaboratives are playing in the delivery of social services. The QOL program involves statistical analysis, data mapping and annual benchmarking of key social, economic and community health indicators. This compilation of vital signs provides a picture of the health or "quality of life" of different communities, regions and the county as a whole.

The Community Indicators Consortium (comprised of):

International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS)
[http://marketing.cob.vt.edu/isqols]

Community Statistical Systems (CSS) network
International Sustainability Indicators Network (ISIN)
[http://www.sustainabilityindicators.org]

National Association of Planning Councils (NAPC)
[http://www.communityplanning.org]

Association for Community Health Improvement (ACHI)
[http://www.communityhlth.org]

United Way America (UWA) [http://national.unitedway.org]

Social Indicators Working Group of the International Sociological
Association (ISA)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [http://www.cdc.gov]

National Civic League (NCL) [http://www.ncl.org]

International Links

International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) is the international environmental agency for local governments. Its mission is to build and serve a worldwide movement of local governments to achieve tangible improvements in global environmental and sustainable development conditions through cumulative local actions. Building a worldwide movement requires that ICLEI functions as a democratic, international association of local governments. Serving a worldwide movement requires that ICLEI operates as an international environmental agency for local governments. More than 350 cities, towns, counties, and their associations worldwide comprise ICLEI's membership. They and hundreds of other local governments are engaged in ICLEI's international campaigns and regional projects. Through its campaigns, ICLEI helps local government generate political awareness of key issues, build capacity through technical assistance and training, and evaluate local and cumulative progress toward sustainable development. ICLEI serves as an information clearinghouse on sustainable development by providing policy guidance, training and technical assistance, and consultancy services to increase local governments' capacity to address global challenges.

Online Planning - this site covers issues relevant to developing planning systems on the Internet. Online Planning aims to cover and discuss issues ranging from the impact of the Internet on the planning process to techniques on enhancing planning based web sites. The site includes various demonstrations of Internet based Virtual Reality which have wide ranging implications for the planning and urban design community.

Knowldege Networking

Definition
Knowledge Networking (KN) is a term the National Science Foundation (NSF) has coined to describe one of its grant making programs. KN aims "to achieve new levels of knowledge integration, information flow, and interactivity among people, organizations, and communities, and to deepen our understanding of the ethical, legal, and social implications of knowledge networking." http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1999/nsf9929/nsf9929.htm#kn

The NSF underscores the importance of this emergent domain of inquiry in the following terms:.

[...] The recent growth in computer power and connectivity has changed the face of science and engineering. The future promises continued acceleration of these changes. The challenge today is to build upon the fruits of this revolution. This rise in power, connectivity, content, and flexibility is so fundamental that it is dramatically reshaping relationships among people and organizations, and quickly transforming our processes of discovery, learning, exploration, cooperation, and communication. It permits us to study vastly more complex systems than was hitherto possible and provides a foundation for rapid advances in understanding of learning and intelligent behavior in living and engineered systems. Today's challenge is to realize the full potential of these new resources and institutional transformations. <http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1999/nsf9929/nsf9929.htm#kn>

Goals of Knowledge Networking
The goals of Knowledge Networking (KN) are:

to understand the fundamental processes through which knowledge is created, communicated, validated, and valued in distributed systems of information, both natural and engineered, and

to improve the technical, social, educational, and economic performance of knowledge generation and use, collaborative computation, and remote interaction. KN will support multidisciplinary research on developing and employing the next generation of communication networks, associated information repositories, collaborative technologies, and knowledge management techniques to gather, create, distribute, use, and evaluate knowledge in new and secure ways. This explicitly includes research on the human, behavioral, social, and ethical dimensions of knowledge networking.
(excerpts cut from the KDI web page @ http://www.nsf.gov/kdi)
Anticipated outcomes of Knowledge Networking research include:
enhanced communication across disciplines, languages, and cultures
improved processing and integration of knowledge from different sources, domains, and non-text media types
increased effectiveness of teams, organizations, classrooms, or communities that work together across distances or over time
deeper understanding of the ethical, legal, and social implications of new developments in connectivity

Research Emphases KN will emphasize three broad areas of knowledge networking: foundational research; prototype development and research; and ethical, social, and behavioral research.

Knowledge Dissemination and Sustainable Use of Knowledge Networks · Cognitive and social processes of creating, developing, maintaining, and dismantling knowledge networks · Intellectual property, privacy, confidentiality and credibility of information and of participants in knowledge networks · Adapting knowledge networks to human needs, preferences, and abilities, including cognitive, cultural, economic, and educational differences in the access, use, and benefit from knowledge networks

Social Integration and Impacts of Knowledge Networking · New methodologies, metrics, and investigations of the scientific, technical, economic, and human performance capabilities and the social, organizational, and economic impacts of knowledge networks · Ethical, social, political, legal, and economic processes that influence the creation, use, ownership, and governance of knowledge networks ·

Creation, distribution, life course, and other characteristics of "knowledge capital" Further description of these and other themes appears on the KDI web page (http://www.nsf.gov/kdi) under KN examples and themes.

Fostering digital communities
http://www.experiencedesignernetwork.com/archives/000497.html

The Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Bureau of Rural Sciences has released Towards Whole of Community Engagement: A Practical Toolkit. (a 160 page pdf file). It offers some interesting insights into design processes that foster community engagement and are therefore of interest to anyone interested in improving interaction, conversation, and dialogue regardless of their particular area of expertise.