Cynthia Girling

Comparing Stormwater Impacts and Costs on Three Neighborhood Plan Types

This paper summarizes a comparison of three alternative plans for a demonstration development site for environmental impacts, particularly stormwater quantity and quality, and costs of development. Two of the three alternatives are representative of neighborhood plan types in many areas of the United States—a conventional low density pattern typical of many subdivision developments, and a more dense, mixed use new urbanist-influenced pattern. A third less common but lower environmental impact plan represents similar density and land use mixes to the mixed use plan with greater open space, urban forest and stormwater features. Each plan preserves different amounts of open space and pursues different approaches to infrastructure, urban forests and stormwater management. Comparing neighborhood development patterns from a stormwater perspective, the findings suggest that the higher densities, mixed uses and greater vehicular and pedestrian connectivity now encouraged in Oregon and elsewhere in the nation can either compete with or complement goals of water resource protection and stormwater runoff reduction. To become both complementary and cost-effective, strategic tradeoffs must be made between land dedicated to roads and parking and land dedicated to open space, urban forest and stormwater.

UD Co-Spaces: A Table-Centred Multi-Display Environment for Public Engagement in Urban Design Charrettes

UD Co-Spaces (Urban Design Collaborative Spaces) is an integrated, tabletop-centered multi-display environment for engaging the public in the complex process of collaborative urban design. We describe the iterative user-centered process that we followed over six years through a close interdisciplinary collaboration involving experts in urban design and neighbourhood planning. Versions of UD Co-Spaces were deployed in five real-world charrettes (planning workshops) with 83 participants, a heuristic evaluation with three domain experts, and a qualitative laboratory study with 37 participants. We reflect on our design decisions and how multi-display environments can engage a broad range of stakeholders in decision making and foster collaboration and co-creation within urban design. We examine the parallel use of different displays, each with tailored interactive visualizations, and whether this affects what people can learn about the consequences of their choices for sustainable neighborhoods. We assess UD Co-Spaces using seven principles for collaborative urban design tools that we identified based on literature in urban design, CSCW, and public engagement.

Dumb pipes for smart systems: How tomorrow's applications can salvage yesterday's plumbing

Tomorrows immersive applications will leverage Mixed Reality interfaces accessing a multitude of services from distributed clouds. They will face extreme latency constraints, massive datasets, spontaneous collaboration, and constant service churn. This paper outlines our experience evolving an application designed to support collaborative work in Urban Design (UD) practices. The application, UD Co-Spaces, recently weathered significant churn as a core service was discontinued and replaced by a service with a subtly different API. A “dumb pipes” approach, where services communicate through a simple message queue, facilitated this evolution with relatively little disruption to the rest of the system. We show how this strategy can be used to reintroduce new features to the system, and is sustainable as the systems interfaces evolve to use Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality environments.

Smart Growth meets low impact development: a case study of UniverCity, Vancouver, Canada

Climate change, environmental degradation, and failing infrastructure are only some factors driving many cities toward adopting policies for more sustainable development. Do the resulting developments return the promised benefits? This paper evaluates one such sustainable development, most notable for its mandate to protect downstream salmon habitat despite being a high‐density, high elevation development. At five years old and 39% complete, UniverCity in Vancouver, Canada has achieved some measures of a sustainable neighborhood. It is a walkable and compact neighborhood that has mitigated some urban runoff impacts. While the development has not yet achieved its high goals for “no net impact” on downstream habitat, the development team is monitoring performance and adapting designs and management over time.