Laxmi Ramasubramanian

Geographic Information Science and Public Participation

PART I: Participatory Planning: Why does it matter?- 1. Dilemmas in Contemporary Planning.- 2. The Digital Revolution.- 3. A Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) Frameword.- 4. PPGIS: State of the Practice.- PART II: Three Narratives.- 5. Politics and Participation in Bostons South End.- 6. Planning to Preserve Community Character in Oak Park, Illinois.- 7. Chicagolands Search for Common Ground.- 8. Issues in PPGIS Implementation.- PART III: The Future of PPGIS.- 9. PPGIS as Critical Reflective Practice.- 10. Where to, from here?

The Digital Revolution

In the last chapter, I described a 1995 settlement negotiated between a powerful corporation (an insurance company) and relatively powerless homeowners. In this classic David vs. Goliath scenario, against all odds, the homeowners emerged victorious. Digital technologies, data, and information, anchored by sustained community activism influenced settlement negotiations. In this chapter, I propose that the roots of this particular type of digitally mediated community advocacy were established a long time ago – in the late 1960s in fact. In this chapter, I trace the history of the digital revolution that occurred in parallel with the more prominent civil rights revolution in the United States.

Information technologies and civic engagement: Perspectives from librarianship and planning

Abstract Urban planning and librarianship are parallel fields in many ways. Both have theoretical and practical underpinnings driving each discipline; are interdisciplinary in focus; and both professions gather and disseminate information to stakeholders. Essential to the success of each discipline is an engaged user population. The authors use a case study from the Village of Oak Park to examine and reflect upon the effect of the Internet and other technologies in the publics ability to participate in an open planning process. The Village of Oak Park is known for its architectural heritage and outspoken community. Within its 4.5 square miles live a diverse population of approximately 52,000 people from different cultures, races, ethnicities, professions, lifestyles, religions, ages, and incomes where a majority of the population have some advanced education and over 80% of the households report home Internet use. How does a community like the Village of Oak Park engage in the planning process? What role does information play in this process? Can modern Information Technologies facilitate civic engagement? These questions are examined during a year-long case study conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in cooperation with the Village of Oak Park (VOP). Specifically, the investigators examined how information is gathered and used in the planning process and how the introduction of Information Technology (IT) tools influenced public participation and introduced many citizens to e-government through the planning process. The use of these tools is compared to the traditional planning process. Data from the project is presented to demonstrate a different kind of role librarians play in the research process. Last, the authors discuss the role of privacy in the gathering and sharing of information with the reliability of that information and the impact of privacy on the public planning process.

PPGIS as Critical Reflective Practice

The ideas in the book revolve around three cross-cutting themes – planning, participation, and technologies. What follows is a synthesis of lessons learned from the literature (Chaps. 2 and 3), the survey of the state of the practice (Chap. 4), and the individual case studies (Chaps. 5, 6, and 7) and an assessment of their relative merits (Chap. 8). In this chapter, I propose that GIS facilitates individual and community capacity building. Yet, the advantages that GIS offer are only maximized when the tools are embedded and integrated into a participatory process.

PPGIS: State of the Practice

I have previously observed that public involvement in planning is determined by particular social, political, and cultural contexts. Similarly, GIS adoption and implementation in planning is also influenced by a wide variety of contextual factors such as the attitudes of key decision makers towards the new technologies, availability of skilled personnel, and resource constraints (e.g., Masser & Onsrud, 1993; Campbell & Masser, 1995; Huxhold & Levinsohn, 1995; Obermeyer & Pinto, 2008). Even inter-departmental rivalries can influence how GIS adoption progresses within an organization (e.g., Kraemer et al., 1989).

Ferry Parking and Landside Access Study: Implementing Public Outreach and Impact Assessment

Through federal regulations, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are mandated to perform public outreach and impact assessment. Although there are some established parameters, the quality and effectiveness of public outreach efforts vary widely, and in many instances information dissemination becomes the central focus of public outreach efforts. However, information dissemination, although essential, is not as effective as a two-way process of public involvement in which members of the public may provide feedback to shape agency initiatives. Research conducted for the Ferry Parking and Landside Access Study is used to describe best practices in public outreach, focusing on socio-economic and community impact assessment. The landside access study represents a dedicated effort by the New York MPO to approach planning for waterborne services by using a comprehensive approach based on land use. With emphasis on land-use criteria, the focus is on people and impact, unlike the traditional demand analysis seen in past ferry studies. By acknowledging regulatory shortcomings and outlining a plan for implementing public outreach and impact assessment, success for consensus building is likely. Practitioners are encouraged to examine the effectiveness of their own public outreach and impact assessment methods.

Book Review: The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture

design professionals cannot. Rios also takes each movement to task for not fully operationalizing sustainability in social terms, calling widely to address inequalities at various levels of the urban form. Hill and Larsen pick up where Rios leaves off, highlighting the obsolescence of the Landscape–New Urbanism debate and the failure of both in addressing climate change. Hill and Larsen call New Urbanists’ claims “moral” and “territorial” and without a proven track record to affect human behavior (223). “Adaptive urbanism” and “equitable urbanism” (228) must be what guides future urban development if we are to make serious progress. Indeed, we view the Landscape–New Urbanist debate as old as the city itself—how to reconcile urbanism and environment. Each viewpoint is dependent on the “otherness of others” as an intellectual springboard (159). And, like any of the best stories of our time, both the hero and villain (which one is which in this scenario is in the eye of the reader) are both essential to the success of the work. Opposing forces motivate, and urban theorists need both Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism to pull itself out of Solomon’s “cold tundra of irrelevance” (160) and play important roles in the innovations that will address the challenges of our modern world. While Discontents aims to resolve the debate between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism, which movement reigns supreme is as complex as the history of urban development and may only be determined by the viewpoint of the reader. Duany and Talen’s collection of chapters offers academics and practitioners in the urban design and planning arena an interesting debate surrounding theory, concepts, and practical application of two entangled movements.

Dilemmas in Contemporary Planning

When I was a graduate student at MIT, I signed on for a part-time job. A MIT researcher.1 I knew was in the process of perfecting a new piece of software called City View/Town View. The program was designed to assist novice users in describing their own neighborhoods using an electronic story board. The program was not a complex one; it was essentially a customization/adaptation of Apple’s HyperCard.2

Politics and Participation in Boston’s South End

This chapter tells a detailed story of a small coalition of housing advocates in Boston’s South End. The coalition’s participants are identified only by pseudonyms,1 except for elected officials. The events of this story took place little over a decade ago – this is an important fact to keep in mind as you read further; this chapter is a history lesson in more ways than one. The events that are reported here, although they occurred in the 1990s are in fact shaped by tumultuous events that occurred in an earlier era.

Planning to Preserve Community Character in Oak Park, Illinois

This chapter describes my own personal experiences working on a project funded by the Village of Oak Park, Illinois. The project itself was a year-long collaboration between the Village of Oak Park, Illinois and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in which a fairly sizable group of faculty, graduate students, village staff, citizen activists and volunteers came together to develop neighborhood character plans for two commercial business districts in the village. One of the unique contributions I made to this project was to explore how computer-mediated visualization and communication tools could be used to complement and facilitate conventional community organizing and traditional participatory planning.