Directions Magazine has published an article called “Making Smart Growth Smarter with GeoDesign.”  The article, co-authored by Ahmed Abukhater from ESRI and Doug Walker from Placeways, describes how “GeoDesign” tools like CommunityViz are reinvigorating Smart Growth plans and planning processes.  GeoDesign is a new term for a lot of what CommunityViz software does.  This article describes how GeoDesign tools and techniques are helping planners improve their planning work and create better plans.  Read the full article here.

What would a commercial highway strip look like if it were redeveloped into a denser, mixed-use street? What would planners think? What would residents think?

Recently, Placeways helped the City of Golden, Colorado answer some of these questions as part of the Golden Vision 2030 project. City planners wanted to gain experience with value-based decision making in a public setting use some realistic, but still hypothetical, scenarios. One of the scenarios was redeveloping several blocks of a road. Planners wanted to show what it would look like to transform the highway into a more urban form, with buildings closer to the street, closer together, and taller. They were also interested how much new retail, office, and residential space various designs would create.

Using CommunityViz^® Scenario 360™ and Scenario 3D™, Placeways created interactive 3D models of current conditions and potential future conditions. The future options included versions of the street with changeable building heights and the option for stepped back “layer cake” designs. During the public meeting, participants were given a tour of the various options and asked about how they related to community values.

“Seeing those buildings get taller and taller really made me realize some things about what I value,” said one participant. Meanwhile, City planners were interested to learn from CommunityViz-driven capacity calculations that the stepped-back designs, which many participants preferred, could provide almost as much office and residential capacity as similar-seeming flat-front designs.

Version 4.1 is here! The latest CommunityViz release is now available to purchase in our online store.

Read about new features or download a free trial and evaluate Version 4.1 for 30 days.

Customers with existing technical support contracts are eligible to upgrade to Version 4.1 for free. To access your upgrade, log in to your account, where you’ll find instructions for installing the software and reactivating your license.

Waiting to upgrade to ArcGIS 10?

CommunityViz 4.1 is designed for ArcGIS 9.2 and 9.3. Customers with technical support will receive free upgrades to an ArcGIS 10-compatible CommunityViz release shortly after ArcGIS 10 is released.

We’re excited to announce the upcoming release of CommunityViz 4.1. This version expands and improves the capabilities of Version 4.0 with enhancements throughout the system that include:

• faster performance
• improved presentation tools, including an updated version of WebShots
• new interactive analysis capabilities
• user preference settings

CommunityViz 4.1 will soon be available for purchase on the Placeways website. Customers with current technical support contracts will be eligible to upgrade to Version 4.1 for free – look out for an email with instructions on how to obtain your upgrade.

The CommunityViz team from Placeways will be at the 2010 APA National Planning Conference, April 10th through 12th in New Orleans. We have a full schedule of events lined up – please join us!

• Visit us at booth 507 in the Exhibit Hall to talk to CommunityViz experts, see live demos, and learn about exciting new features
• We’ll also have a station at the ESRI booth in the Exhibit Hall
• On Sunday, April 11 from 11:45 AM to 1:00 PM, we will be co-hosting ESRI’s Planning Special Interest Group meeting. Come to the Morial Convention Center, 2nd Floor, Room RO5, to find out how GIS can engage the public in participatory decision making and help visualize the future with GeoDesign.
• Placeways’ Doug Walker will be giving a talk on CommunityViz: A GeoDesign Tool for Planners at the ESRI Technology Showcase on Sunday, April 11 from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
• Register to attend our workshop, GIS for Growth Planning and Land-Use Visualization, on Monday, April 12 from 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM

How should planners leverage Planning 2.0 to connect with their communities? This is the current topic of discussion at the ESRI Spatial Roundtable, where Placeways’ Doug Walker is a featured contributor. Visit the Spatial Roundtable to read the conversation and chime in with your own thoughts!

GeoDesign is a wonderful new term ESRI has coined for a lot of what CommunityViz software does.   At the recent GeoDesign Summit in California, about 300 invited guests and luminaries from the fields of planning, landscape architecture, design, and (of course) GIS spent two and a half days extolling its virtues, imaging its future, and trying to come up with a definition for what exactly “GeoDesign” actually means.

The short description of geodesign is the pairing of GIS and design.  The slightly longer one is something along the lines of the process of sketching possible plans, getting fast feedback on their impacts, modifying, and making decisions.

At the GeoDesign Summit, Bran Ferren, Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds and former head of Disney Imagineering, scolded the group for not having a better definition and then went on to say that education is the world’s greatest woe and one that geodesign tools might redress.  Carl Steinitz of Harvard described five methods of planning and how geodesign helps every one of them.  And Tom Fisher, Dean of Design at the University of Minnesota, declared that geodesign is an essential tool for the fragile world we live in.  The excitement in the rooms was palpable, and those of us who attended had a strong sense that we might be in on the beginning of Something Big.

Well, not exactly the beginning — geodesign already has momentum, success stories, and enabling technology in the form of CommunityViz and tools like it.   The thousands of people who use CommunityViz often start by sketching their ideas for possible futures, using capabilities like Scenario Sketch Tools and Land Use Designer.  They get instant feedback on consequences via real-time analysis including visual presentations like dynamic charts and color-changing maps.  Analysis often crosses disciplines and the “smokestacks” or “stovepipes” of particular domains, as impacts of many kinds are modeled and displayed in side-by-side charts.  Users can go from 2D to 3D views quickly and easily, making proposals and their outcomes  easier to understand.  And in the end, people are making more informed, collaborative decisions.

CommunityViz isn’t the only geodesign tool around.  There are others that do bits and pieces as well, and the GeoDesign Summit was full of cool demonstrations and fascinating examples of what can be done when design and GIS come together.  What feels most new and exciting to us, along with the name, is the growing understanding of how powerful and important these capabilities really are.

It was not too many years ago that $100,000 or $200,000 would buy you a nice 3D visualization of a proposed transportation project: a bridge, an HOV lane, a transit stop, or the like. Compared to the cost of the project, a few hundred thousand dollars felt like a drop in the bucket, and the results seemed worth it. These were beautiful renderings designed to impress, and they did. “Cool” was the most common adjective; “wow” was the reaction to the technology. The models were unveiled with great fanfare in the boardroom during the budget approval meeting, displayed for the public, and, after that, posted on someone’s wall or in the lobby.

That was then. Today, transportation visualization is undergoing a rapid transformation. Costs are dropping, applications are exploding, and this formerly gee-whiz technology is making itself useful in all kinds of new ways. You could say it has left the boardroom, rolled up its sleeves, and gone to work.

A 3-D visualization brings to life a cross-section of a local commercial street.

CommunityViz is in the thick of it. With inexpensive but high quality 3D tools like Scenario 3D and the Google Earth Exporter, planners now have the ability to make effective visual models quickly and easily. They can sketch several alternatives early in the planning process, for example, to get some initial feedback and buy-in for a particular approach. They can create visual models of large regions instead of needing to focus on a small site. And, because it’s CommunityViz, they can consider the visuals together with the analytics—impacts, economics, etc.

If you’re looking for examples, try our case studies on TOD visualization and land-use-transportation integration.

To find out more about the latest from the Transportation Research Board’s Visualization Committee (of which Placeways’ own Doug Walker is a member), visit the committee’s new social network site at http://trbvis.ning.com.

This Scenario 3D screenshot is from a project in rural Killingly, Connecticut that Placeways has been helping with. It’s part of the broader, cross-discipline Borderlands Project and the associated Village Innovation Pilot that are working to preserve the unique assets of lands and towns along the Connecticut-Rhode Island border.

The particular location of this scene is called “Four Corners,” which—and this is the acid test—you would recognize if you’ve been there. I can make that claim because I asked, and people who live there knew it when they saw me “drive” down the street in the Scenario 3D Viewer. (Screenshots never seem to do the interactive 3D scene justice, but you get the idea.)

If you look closely you can see the scene starts with a pretty good (though not at all perfect) aerial photo draped on the ground (whose terrain came from contour lines). To that we added cars, utility poles, grass, trees, and extruded building footprints (those brown ones in the back). The cars point the right way because we used CommunityViz Scenario 360 to calculate the proper angle relative to the road centerline. We finished off with a few custom-made SketchUp models of the iconic sights: here you can see the tall Dunkin’ Donuts sign and historic Zip’s Diner in the background.

We certainly could have made a much more detailed and perfect-looking scene. For example that SUV in the intersection seems to be about six inches too high, and we could have replaced the brown extrusions with SketchUp buildings. If you get going on scenes like this, the list never ends: Shrubbery. Sidewalks. Pedestrians. Street signs. Etc., etc., etc.

In most cases, though, I think the trick is to do just enough. Granted, it’s fun to make 3D scenes. And sometimes the project calls for lots of fidelity and detail. But if you spend forever on every 3D scene, you’ll use up time and budget that probably could have been spent elsewhere.

The “just enough” test for existing conditions is that simple question I asked earlier: Would you recognize it if you’ve been there? If the audience can mentally place themselves in the scene with ease, making the connection between computer model and real world, then you pass the “just enough” test. You have sufficient context that when you start illustrating alternative scenarios and new proposals, people can picture them in place.

How much is “just enough” for illustrating the new proposals? I think the same rule applies. If, after looking at the computer model, you go visit the actual new construction for the first time and you recognize it easily, then the computer model was “enough.” If you design your work carefully, you might be surprised at how little modeling is required.

Damariscotta, Maine is a small New England town nestled along the coast and steeped in history and traditions. Old brick buildings line the main street; an ancient Native American oyster shell midden speaks to a long past of fishing; and in the fall, creatively decorated pumpkins line the streets as part of the annual Great Pumpkin Fest and Regatta.

But Damariscotta is looking to the future, as well, and as part of their planning they are using thoroughly modern tools including CommunityViz.

Recipients of a Heart and Soul Community Planning grant from the Orton Family Foundation, Damariscotta has embarked on a long-term planning process aimed at creating a vision, plans and actions to reinforce the qualities that make Damariscotta a great place to live. You can read more about it on Orton’s site and the project’s site.

A major focus of the project is what Orton calls “Heart and Soul,” or “those tangible and intangible elements that if lost would fundamentally change the character of [a] place.” In Damariscotta, an extensive outreach campaign drew out five broad values that residents share the most:

• living locally
• working locally
• sense of community
• where nature and culture meet
• access to town

If, for example, people here had to commute long distances to work, it just wouldn’t be Damariscotta, they essentially said.

The local consulting firm Spatial Alternatives, with some help from us here at Placeways, worked with the town to build a CommunityViz model that effectively scored plan alternatives on how well they would support each of the five values. Plans that had too little affordable housing, for example, scored poorly on “living locally,” while a dearth of jobs hurt the “working locally” score. The model was more complicated than this simplified description, but that’s the general idea.

Damariscotta Scenario Comparison

One of the best things about the model is that it isn’t a black box. Anyone can see how it’s built, and it’s easy to change. Better yet, the more subjective components are set up with CommunityViz slider bars so they’re easy to adjust during the course of a discussion.

There was a chance to try out the model “on the ground,” so to speak, during a design charrette that was held last month. While town residents met with planners by day and designers sketched ideas by night, CommunityViz was used to illustrate the effects different plans would have on the town’s character in years to come. How did it work? We’re not sure yet. Ask us in years to come!