This site, developed for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy by a team led by Lew Hopkins, Professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, grew out of a desire to provide planners with an expanded set of tools for communicating planning ideas. The examples emphasize visual representation of planning information.
The featured application in the library of representations is Envisioning Regional Recovery Futures: Places, Persons, Economies, Ecosystems. This work is based on the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the deliberations about recovery in the Gulf Coast region. The templates are, however, useful in planning practice generally.
The representations are organized into four general topics: 1) physical place, 2) relationships and movements of persons and their relationships to to each other in prior and newly emerging communities, 3) the economy of individual firms and regional and global transformations and disruptions, and 4) terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems including river and coastal hydrology, production landscapes, and global warming.