Planning Pool

Want to explore the urban form of London or Berlin but lack the time or plane ticket to visit in person? 3D models of real cities are coming online for exploration and interaction. Besides fun for virtual tourists, the models inform innovative planning applications.

Anyone who has ever modeled a building in AutoCad or Google Sketchup can attest that modeling an entire city sounds impossibly time-consuming. However, thanks to new technologies in data analysis, processing, and remote sensing (from airplanes! with lasers!) basic 3D urban data can now be generated automatically. This makes the 3D modeling of large areas technically feasible, although still prohibitively complex (PDF conference paper behind the link).

The first entire city to be made available on Google Earth in 3D was Berlin, Germany. Created by the State of Berlin’s Senate Department of Urban Development and a host … Continue Reading

Today’s post presents a story about transportation modelling and the real costs of driving, originally covered in this month’s Wired magazine. Congestion pricing isn’t exactly a popular idea in North America, so it’s great to see the science behind it taken seriously in non-planning media.

Thanks to Bernard Garon on Flickr for this great Creative Commons photo of New York Traffic.

The goal of traffic engineering is to maintain the safe and efficient movement of people and goods. It is typically measured in terms of vehicular volume, traffic flow, and incident rates. However, traffic and transit are complicated issues with significant economic, environmental, and social and ramifications. Charles Komanoff, an energy-policy analyst, transport economist and environmental activist, has devoted years to measuring and analyzing New York’s … Continue Reading

Vancouver’s announcement earlier this summer that the city would open its data created quite a buzz on blogs and podcasts around the world.

Photo from Vancouver Transit Camp by Jason Vanderhill on Flickr

What is involved in opening a municipality’s data to the public? The motion passed by Vancouver city council this May includes three simple components:

Any data that the city collects, from current zoning applications to the library catalogue, should be made publicly accessible unless it impacts individual privacy.

While plenty of public documents and data have long been publicly available, open standards will improve its accessibility and usefulness.

City-made software will be licensed … Continue Reading

It’s likely that you’ve already heard about Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that computes answers rather than searching for them, like Google or Yahoo. Invented by a physicist and arguably most useful for calculating science or math questions, Wolfram Alpha also works with demographic and geographical statistics, making it really fun to play with!

So you can get an idea of how useful Wolfram Alpha can be, here are some searches I did:

• A simple comparison of Vancouver and Toronto
• Life expectancy worldwide
• A comparison of some US cities
• Comparison of populations in two Arizona counties
• The comparison of unemployment rates in multiple cities
• State level household income
• Comparison of California’s population as a proportion of Canada’s population

Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha cannot compute some data at the subnational … Continue Reading