Planning Support Systems for Cities and Regions

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 the Lincoln Institute 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 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). This volume is aimed at promoting a critical understanding of the strengths and limitations of the tools. 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.”

About the Editor

Richard K. Brail is professor emeritus at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. His research interests include the applications of information technology in urban planning, geographic information and planning support systems, and urban transportation. He is former chair and program director of the urban planning program and founding director of the National Transit Institute at Rutgers.