Planning Pool

Portland Food Carts: Photo by Author

In Portland you might enjoy a steaming bowl of curry, while in Accra a spicy box of jollof.  Both purchased for a low cost and in a convenient location.  What is known as a cart in Portland or New York, a kiosk in Accra or Moscow, might also be a booth, pavilion or a stand.  Each is a different form of micro-enterprise that plays an increasingly important role in our cities today. A kiosk is an efficient way for an individual to start a business with low costs and short time, while providing an immediate service to an urban area.  Congruently, the vibrancy of a neighborhood can be accentuated through the articulation of these small forms.  But … Continue Reading

Photo courtesy of Lenfest Ocean Futures Project

How much fishing is too much, and what decisions can we make to secure the health of our marine ecosystems? The answer to these and other questions about managing our marine ecosystem have confounded policy makers for decades. A new interactive scenario exploration program being developed at the University of British Columbia just might be the tool they’re looking for.

Ocean Summits is an interactive decision making system that supports stakeholders of a specific marine ecosystem to play out scenarios that can help create consensus on key management issues. The system creates realistic-looking simulated marine ecosystems in which users must make environmental, social and economic choices about their marine environment. They can then compare the results of their new scenario … 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

Well, thus far, it looks as though New York and Los Angeles have the best planning websites of the first round.  Toronto isn’t too far behind and polling will remain open through November.  Admittedly, the sample size is pretty small – but we move forward…

Our second group of cities ranges from the glorious to the notorious, perhaps with websites to match.  Take a glance and let us know what you think of these planning sites from the Northeast.

Remember, the rating scale is as follows:

• born with gills (best)
• making waves
• treading water
• strictly kiddie pool
• floats like a brick (worst)

Do these sites give you a window into planning in their respective cities, or would things be clearer if they tried to explain in Esperanto?
Round 2: Northeast Division
Philadelphia

Does Philadelphia’s website … Continue Reading

In keeping with our theme here at Planning Pool, we’re proud to present the first annual Sink or Swim Series, honoring cities that make good use of new media to involve the public in planning.  The point of this exercise is to identify what works well and what doesn’t when city websites communicate plans. We’re all about inclusiveness, so we won’t be making the calls ourselves, but will instead be relying upon your input.  Every week, a few cities will be presented for your critique.

Now, we know not everyone enjoys reading the nitty-gritty of planning documents, so please remember: you are not judging whether a city’s plans are “good”, but whether its website makes planning more accessible. Everyone will come at this from a different … Continue Reading

Marpole Grows from Planning Pool on Vimeo.

As part of an on-going research project conducted by UBC urban design professor Maged Senbel, students in SCARP’s Digital Video and Planning course prepared a few short films on development issues facing the south Vancouver neighborhood of Marpole. This particular film, created by  An Minh Vu, Silas Archambault and myself seeks to engage the community in a conversation about how they would like to see Marpole address inevitable development pressures, brought about by a new Skytrain station, among other things. 

It was originally screened at a community meeting where students from other classes, mostly design, presented their own projects. Among these was an impressive scale-model of the area around the new station, as well as a series of 3D computer models. … Continue Reading

A large part of what we’re attempting to do here at the Planning Pool is to implement user-friendly technologies to give people a greater voice in their community.  We’ll be adding/improving a couple of features over the coming months to achieve this goal.  With this in mind, kudos to Eric Gordon and Gene Koo, who have together been awarded a MacArthur grant for their Hub2 project to explore the urban planning applications of the video game Second Life.

Though some old-timers will scoff at the thought that Second Life might one day be a widely utilized planning tool, it (or something similar) will become only more viable in the future.  There are surely large chunks of essential information (like accurate budgeting) that cannot yet be fully captured in video games, but people like … Continue Reading