Planning Support Systems for Cities and Regions (Book)

Editor(s): Brail, Richard K.
Publication Date: October 2008

$35.00; 312 pages; Inventory ID 182-8; English; Paperback; ISBN 978-1-55844-182-8


Introduction	714 KB

Abstract

This book invites the reader to join in a virtual dialogue with its authors—educators, theorists, model builders, and planners—about technology and the social context in which technology is employed. It is also the trace of a face-to-face dialogue that took place at Lincoln House in Cambridge in September 2007, when the Institute convened the authors and several invited planning experts to discuss earlier drafts of these chapters on the state of the art in planning support systems. (This term dates only to 1989 and is attributed to Britton Harris, if not first coined by him.)

This dialogue, or perhaps dialectic, revolves around the almost unlimited potential of computer-based tools to enhance the effectiveness of planning and the serious challenges in applying these tools within real-world planning environments. The Lincoln Institute has focused on tools for planners in a number of its recent books, including Kwartler and Longo’s Visioning and Visualization: People, Pixels, and Plans (2008), Campoli and MacLean’s Visualizing Density (2007), and Hopkins and Zapata’s Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects (2007).

All three of these books and the current volume have in common, albeit to varying degrees, an interest in the spatial and visual side of planning. However, it is useful to differentiate the two visualization/design books from this volume and Engaging the Future, which are less about “showing” the tools and more about promoting a critical understanding of their strengths and limitations. The intended audience, therefore, is both the user—and potential user—of these tools, and those who seek to continue to improve them.

Editor Richard K. Brail has brought together the wisest of the field’s thinkers, the most inventive of the toolmakers, the most experienced of those working at the interface with real clients, and the most battle-seasoned practicing planners (and many of these individuals occupy more than one of these niches). Together they present a broad view of the field, in-depth developmental histories of the most important models and tools as told by their creators, and a provocative, in-the-trenches critique of the state of the art.

Planning will never be easy; it needs and deserves the best support systems that modelers and system developers can deliver. This volume not only reports that they are “working on it,” but also gives us a glimpse at future tools suited to a planning process that has become, as Brail says, “more visual, more public, more accessible, and more collaborative.”

Foreword, Armando Carbonell

Introduction, Richard K. Brail

Section 1: A Broader Perspective

1. Planning Support Systems: Progress, Predictions, and Speculations on the Shape of Things to Come, Michael Batty

2. Disseminating Spatial Decision Support Systems in Urban Planning, Harry Timmermans

Section 2: The Regional Scale

3. A Decade of Cellular Urban Modeling with SLEUTH: Unresolved Issues and Problems, Keith C. Clarke

4. Simulating Regional Futures: The Land-use Evolution and impact Assessment Model (LEAM), Brian Deal and Varkki Pallathucheril

5. A New Tool for a New Planning: The What if? Planning Support System, Richard E. Klosterman

Section 3: Moving from Region to City

6. UrbanSim: An Evolving Planning Support System for Evolving Communities, Paul Waddell, Xuan Liu, and Liming Wang

7. Clicking Toward Better Outcomes: Experience with INDEX, 1994 to 2006, Eliot Allen

8. Communities in Control: Developing Local Models Using CommunityViz®, George Janes and Michael Kwartler

9. Development Control Planning Support Systems, Anthony G. O. Yeh

Section 4: Planning Support Systems in Practice

10. Planning Support Systems: A Planner’s Perspective, Stan Geertman

11. Planning Support Systems: What Are Practicing Planners Looking For?, Terry Moore

About the Editor: Richard Brail is professor of urban planning in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. His interests include the applications of information technology in urban planning, geographic information and planning support systems, and urban transportation. Contact: rbrail@rutgers.edu