GeoDesign and GIS – Designing our Futures · very exciting for land-use and environmental...

GeoDesign and GIS – Designing our Futures

Jack DANGERMOND

1 Introduction

Information Technology is changing the Profession of Landscape Architecture daily to a greater extent. Therefore it’s relevant that Jack Dangermond, as the head of a worldwide leading software company is contributing his vision on the challenges of the future Information Technology for the Landscape Architecture profession.

His vision than he was student of Carl Steinitz and Peter Rogers at Harvard University has continued to guide his firm ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) in creating cutting-edge GIS and GeoDesign technologies used in every industry to make a difference worldwide.

His contribution starts in reflecting the importance of the theories with RICHARD NEUTRA “Survival through Design”, MCHARG “Design with Nature” and CARL STEINITIZ “The Steinitiz Model of Landscape Design” is the basis for applying the future integrated GeoDesign platform. GeoDesign is referred as an evolutionary step in the GIS field. While very exciting for land-use and environmental planning, GeoDesign has broad implications for virtually all professions.

GeoDesign has the potential to improve design and planning process and hence it remains inevitable to pursue the concept. Sustainable development is the key goal of the society today and hence we need to develop advanced geospatial technologies along with design process to achieve this social goal. The research labs of the Landscape Architecture Schools need to cooperate with the CAD and GIS Industry in developing the standardization definitions of objects of Landscape Information Models (LIM). The contribution of the article to the serious of paper from Neighbouring Disciplines to Landscape Architecture is adapted from two recently published publications of JACK

DANGERMOND in ArcNews ESRI Summer 2009 “GIS: Designing our Future” and ArcNews ESRI Fall 2009 “GIS, Design and Evolving Technology”.

2 GIS: Designing Our Future

“Man may perish by his own explosive and insidious inventions. For an adjustment to them he leaves himself precious little time, and progressively less as his technological wizardry runs wild and rushes on. If he is to survive at all, it cannot be through slow adjustment. It will have to be through design more subtly considered and circumspect, through more cautious planning in advance.” – RICHARD NEUTRA, architect, 1954 With those words in 1954, influential architect Richard Neutra opened his seminal book Survival through Design. Neutra was an early environmentalist, taking an approach to

GeoDesign and GIS – Designing our futures 503

architectural design that applied elements of biological and behavioral science – what he called biorealism, or the “inherent and inseparable relationship between man and nature.” Fifteen years later, in his groundbreaking book Design with Nature, landscape architect Ian MCHARG advocated a framework for design that helps humans achieve synergy with nature. Design and planning that take into consideration both environmental and social issues help us ensure that our resources are used appropriately and responsibly, to help us move toward a better future for all. MCHARG’S pioneering work not only had a fundamental influence on the up-and-coming field of environmental planning but simultaneously solidified the core concepts of the young field of GIS as well.

In the 40 years since Design with Nature was written, a better world is the common goal all of us-geographers, planners, scientists, and others – have been striving for. Discussing his book during the Keynote Address at the 1997 ESRI International User Conference, MCHARG laid out a process by which “environmental data could be incorporated into the planning process.” Rejecting the view of a future modeled after some idyllic environmental past, he instead was an early adopter of the view that we should be using our dominance of earth systems to help evolve the natural world and make it better, rather than conquer it. Powerful anthropogenic influence over earth systems represents not just a huge challenge but an equally huge opportunity – not humans versus nature, but humans with nature. “While traditional ecological research selected environments with a minimum human influence, I selected arenas of human dominance,” MCHARG said. Today more than ever, it is important to recognize the overwhelming impact of humans on the environment, that massive human impacts on the earth are a fact that’s not going away, and that we stand at the crossroads. Thus, our challenge is to provide designers, engineers, planners, and others, with a set of tools and a framework for designing and managing the anthropogenic earth.

Design for the Anthropogenic Earth

I’ve recently become very interested in the relatively new field of earth systems engineering and management (ESEM), which concerns itself with the design, engineering, analysis, and management of complex earth systems. ESEM takes a holistic view of multiple issues affecting our earth – not only taking environmental, social, and other considerations into account up front in the design process but also looking at challenges from an adaptive systems approach, where ongoing analysis feeds back into the continual management of the system.

Braden Allenby, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University and one of ESEM’s founders, often emphasizes the undeniably dominant role humans have in earth systems. “We live in a world that is fundamentally different from anything that we have known in the past,” says Allenby in his paper “The Metaphysics of the Anthropogenic Earth Part I: Integrative Cognitivism,” “It is a world dominated by one species, its activities and technologies, its cultures, and the integrated effects of its histori-cal evolution.” MCHARG was already moving in this direction in the 1960s, and today we understand that it is even more important to emphasize the anthropogenic elements of earth systems. In other words, at this stage of ecological evolution, humans are a significant, if not dominating, component of the natural environment, and all problems need to be addressed and decisions made with anthropogenic elements in the forefront.

J. Dangermond, ESRI 504

Allenby sees reasoned design and management in the age of the anthropogenic earth as our moral imperative, but the biggest obstacle to our success is that we are not set up to work, or even think, in this way. “We lack solid data and analytical frameworks to make assertions about the costs, benefits, and normative assessments of different practices,” notes Allenby in “Biomass Management Systems” in Reconstructing Earth. And this is why I believe that GIS and the emerging field of GeoDesign are critical to the success of approaches such as ESEM and other logical and rational models for dealing with the environmental and planning problems of ours and future generations.

“We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.” – BILL JOY, Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems

Fig. 1: CARL STEINITZ: Designing Alternative Futures


The key to developing a true understanding of our complex and dynamic earth is creating a framework to take many different pieces of past and future data from a variety of sources and merge them in a single system. GIS is a sophisticated technological tool already in widespread use by planners, engineers, and scientists to display and analyze all forms of location-referenced data about the health, status, and history of our planet. GIS enables a GeoDesign framework for analyzing and managing anthropogenic earth issues by allowing users to inventory and display large, complex spatial datasets. They can also analyze the potential interplay between various factors, getting us closer to a true understanding of how our dynamic earth systems may change in the coming decades and centuries.

Carl Steinitz, an urban planner at Harvard University, originated many of the early ideas about the application of GIS for landscape analysis and urban planning. Steinitz developed a model of landscape change that enables design of alternative futures. Those alternative designs can then be evaluated in terms of their impact on the natural environment as well as their utility to the human population, and the alternative future that is projected to achieve the best balance can then be selected for implementation. With a debt of gratitude to Steinitz (“A Framework for PLF,” Landscape Future), the GeoDesign framework also lets us design and test various alternatives, helping us make the most educated and informed decisions about the best possible future.

Is the earth getting hotter or colder? Is the stress human populations are putting on the planet contributing to climate change? What potential factors may significantly impact our ability to thrive and survive in the future? What additional sorts of environmental monitoring can we be doing today to improve decisions in the future? We are only beginning to understand how to approach these questions, let alone come up with scientifically valid answers. Only through careful observation of the data, application of scientific principles, and using GIS and other technologies do we have any hope of truly understanding the stressors and impacts on the incredibly complex systems that comprise our anthropogenic earth. It’s also the key to making pragmatic, thoughtful, informed design decisions and proposing alternatives that allow humans and nature to coexist more harmoniously.

Design with Nature

Design with Nature – rarely has a three-word title so eloquently summed up an entire tome. The most important word in that title is not design, nor is it nature. It’s with. It sets the stage for design and nature working together in concert to achieve something that is bigger than the sum of the parts, a synergy of design and nature reaching toward the goal of the survival of the human species in particular and the planet in general.

It’s not a stretch to say that the development of GIS technology and the entire industry around it was profoundly influenced by the work of MCHARG. He popularized the overlay concept and laid the groundwork for what was to become GIS, thus taking a number of budding young landscape architects and geographers and changing their lives forever. MCHARG and I may have disagreed on some things, but we clearly shared the vision of using geographic analysis techniques to design a better world. Although we’ve made much progress in building the infrastructure to help us accomplish this monumental task, we’re still not quite there yet. In fact, 28 years after Design with Nature was published, McHarg


issued a challenge of sorts to attendees of the 1997 ESRI International User Conference in his Keynote Address:

“By and large, the ecological planning studies I did in the 1960s and 1970s have not been equaled, far less surpassed. And I think there has got to be a challenge; that is, we’ve got to be able to learn to do at least as well for regions and for the nation and, indeed, for the global environment as we are doing at the moment.”

Like MCHARG’S Design with Nature, ESRI is also celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It’s no coincidence that both the concepts espoused within Design with Nature and the GIS work led by ESRI launched almost simultaneously. When MCHARG advocated this new methodology of taking geographic considerations into the design process and workflow, I don’t know if he could ever have imagined how far we’d come with GIS by 2009. But the hard work we’ve been doing on developing GIS technology for the last 40 years does not mean we are finished, or even close to being finished. And I feel that all our hard work evolving GIS has led us to this pivotal point. The next logical step in the evolution of this technology is GeoDesign.

The Case for GeoDesign

GeoDesign borrows concepts from landscape architecture, environmental studies, geography, planning, regenerative studies, and integrative studies. Much like GIS and environmental planning before it, GeoDesign takes an interdisciplinary, synergistic approach to solving critical problems and optimizing location, orientation, and features of projects both local and global in scale.

Design is art within the framework of limitations – limitations that arise as a result of function, world view, bias, and other factors, but also limitations that arise as a result of place. Design considering place was at the core of MCHARG’S beliefs, and it is the basis for our research and development efforts in the emerging field of GeoDesign.

“. . . design is always and necessarily an art as well as a problem-solving activity . . .” – DAVID PYE, The Nature of Design

To a certain extent, this is already done today by numerous GIS practitioners in fields like urban and regional planning and environmental management. But GeoDesign makes this easier by making it an integral part of the workflow, both shortening the cycle time of the design process and improving the quality of the results.

Cycle time is shortened because GeoDesign moves analysis to an earlier stage in the design process. Rather than analyzing the potential impacts and effects of a proposed project after the design phase, critical factors are instead taken into consideration up front. The quality of the results improves because the project is designed around, in concert with, and / or to fully leverage certain geographic, environmental, and social features while simultaneously minimizing undesirable impacts to those same features.


3 GIS, Design, and Evolving Technology

The concept of GeoDesign was widely introduced during the 2009 Annual ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, California, in July, 2009. The conference emphasized the interesting relationship between design and GIS with emphasis on the concept of “GeoDesign.”. Today, GIS professionals work with geographic information to manage many aspects of our world. Design is a discipline and process where people deliberately create. Design is about purpose and intentions; it’s about seeing in our mind’s eye what could be, then creating it. GIS can provide a platform for integrating geographic science with design. I like to refer to this as the field of GeoDesign purposefully designed with full understanding of the consequences. This will take many participants and more conscious and collective action – action guided by our best vision, science, and intentions. We need to design our future while fully accounting for and being responsible for the consequences of what we do.

Fig. 2: “You are working on all our world’s challenges”

GIS: Designing Our Future

I believe GIS and GIS professionals hold the promise for accomplishing all this. GeoDesign is a systematic methodology for geographic planning and decision making. GeoDesign starts by incorporating all the geographic knowledge that users collectively build and maintain – layers of information, measurements, and analytic models – and plugging it into a new interactive process where one can design alternatives and get geography-based feedback on the consequences of these designs right away. “What if we do this here?” “What is the impact of that alternative versus this alternative?” This iterative design / evaluation process is fundamentally how the human brain works; we try something, evaluate the results, and move on.


Geographic Sketching

Geographic sketching is the central GIS tool for supporting GeoDesign. This new capability allows users to quickly sketch their design ideas on top of suitability maps and get immediate feedback on the performance or impact of the design being proposed. The GIS framework provides instantaneous feedback in the form of maps, charts, and statistics and enables rapid testing of multiple design services.

“You are creating a powerful new kind of information that will lay down the fabric for creating a more sustainable future.”

Dr. Carl Steinitz, professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University, first described how the GeoDesign process worked by posing it in the context of six geographic, or landscape, questions.

Fig. 3: GeoDesign is a rapid and adaptive process for creating a sustainable future.

Adaptd from the Steinitz model of landscape change.

The first question is, How can we describe geography? This is done in a GIS by abstracting geography into a series of inventory data layers. The second question is, How does this geography actually operate? Here, GIS is used to combine data with spatial analysis modeling to describe geographic processes. Examples include soil erosion, land-use and vegetation change, hydrology, and traffic flows. Process models predict or describe how various spatial phenomena change with respect to time. The third question is, How can we alter geography considering all the factors? GIS uses suitability and capability modeling to answer this question. Various map factors are overlaid and weighted relative to their merits for a particular use.


These first three questions describe the world as it is; the following questions describe the world as it could be. First, What are the alternative scenarios for designing the future? This involves sketching out the options. Then, How can we quickly evaluate the consequences of those changes? Here, GIS can be used to evaluate the impacts of each alternative. Last, How should geography be changed?

This integrates considerations such as policies and values into the decision-making process. The concept of GeoDesign integrates all six of these steps, providing us with a rapid, adaptive process for creating a more sustainable future.

GeoDesign Will Extend into Every Field

GeoDesign is an evolutionary step in the GIS field. While very exciting for land-use and environmental planning, GeoDesign has broad implications for virtually all professions. This methodology will be applied in many fields – by retailers who want to understand the consequences of opening or closing stores; by engineers who want to locate a road in the right location; and by utilities, farmers, foresters, law enforcement, energy companies, and military organizations, to name just a few. This approach will move GIS beyond simply describing the world as it is toward the idea of creating the future, integrating geographic thinking into all the work we do.

Fig. 4: GeoDesign is a systematic methodology for geographic planning and decision

making

GIS professionals will chart the future using GeoDesign maps. These maps will become a new language for us to communicate and evaluate the future, showing the world as it could be, encapsulating geographic knowledge with purposeful design. This process is about bringing information and science into the way that we make decisions. Our new president is fond of saying he wants to put science in its rightful place. This is where I think its rightful place is – supporting the creation of the future with new kinds of maps that bring it all together.

The Next Step

Maps and GIS are changing. They’re becoming richer, smarter, and more dynamic. They are also becoming more pervasive and being presented using new styles, new patterns, and new techniques. The Web and Web 2.0-style mashups are leading to a new breed of maps


and geographic analysis. People are integrating traditional GIS data (services) with new media types, such as social networks and real-time data. This movement will lead to geographic knowledge becoming even more widespread in society. This Web environment offers many opportunities for GIS professionals to be creative with new forms of cartography and spreading geographic knowledge everywhere.

Platform Evolution

Today, GIS is being implemented in many different patterns. The desktop pattern is perhaps the most pervasive. Server and enterprise implementations are especially useful in the area of managing organizations, and we see a plethora of new client types, such as rich Internet clients and mobile clients. All these patterns are flourishing and growing, influenced by advances in the technology, faster machines, increased bandwidth, more stor-age, and the emerging cloud-computing resources that can be leveraged and integrated into applications. Today, all these patterns are also integrated with the Web. The Web is linking us and tying our geographic knowledge creation and services into a larger network or infrastructure.

GIS servers are playing an increasing role in this evolution. They’re powering the enterprise and thousands of types of geospatial Web applications – fast maps, the publishing of globes on the Web, and the connecting of mobile workers. They are also supporting mashups and enterprise integration and integrating GIS into other parts of the IT infrastructure. The server is emerging as the foundation for creating spatial data infrastructure with multiple sources of data, services, and applications. The server is also the GIS platform for cloud computing.

The Web as a GIS Platform –

Emerging Rapidly

In ESRI’s lifetime, we’ve witnessed the rise of many platforms, including mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, PCs, and client-server computing – lots of waves of change – and every time, we have morphed our technology to take advantage of the latest platform. We’re now at the dawn of a new era: the era of Web GIS.

The Web is a strong platform for GIS. Web GIS is about serving, integrating, and distributing geographic knowledge – your work – and making it available everywhere. As GIS professionals, you are building the content that drives the GeoWeb. You’re building the data – authoritative data, not just casual data. You’re building high-quality maps, visualizations, and spatial analysis models. You have the geographic knowledge, and you have the skills needed to describe it and share it and build rich applications. In this environment, you are beginning to leverage all that content and knowledge for many new kinds of users. Citizens, knowledge workers, field-workers, industry experts, executives –actually, everyone – can now gain access to your geographic knowledge and leverage it in their own domain.

The technologies fueling this growth are the powerful GIS server technology together with easy-to-use client technology. The clients include the new rich Internet applications,


geobrowsers (i.e., ArcGIS Explorer), and mobile applications. These, coupled with the growing online content and Web sharing capabilities, are fueling a very rapid deployment.

This is a very exciting time for GIS. From my perspective, it’s the most exciting time so far. Web GIS is creating an environment where the applications and the good that GIS can do are about to explode – explode in terms of leveraging our common reservoir of digital geographic knowledge.

Next-Generation Geobrowser

The recently released version of ArcGIS Explorer represents the new standard in geobrowser technology. It has incorporated many new features and capabilities, including a more intuitive user experience, integrated 2D and 3D map display, enhanced data support, integration with ArcGIS Online, easy customization, and a software developer kit.

ArcGIS Explorer is a free and exciting desktop client that can be used to view and mash up virtually any geospatial service, as well as integrate local and enterprise GIS datasets.

Application Templates

One of the things we’ve focused a lot of energy on is making it easier for you to get your work done. We think about this in terms of common applications that all our users employ. We’ve begun providing a set of desktop and server templates that help you implement ArcGIS. Templates will help you configure and use ArcGIS; they include data models, maps, styles (MXPs), and tools. When you find a template you’re interested in, you can watch a video to learn how to use it, view it live on the resource center, or download the contents of the template to configure it in your organization.

You may also want to review the resource center for information on technical topics. When you download a template from the resource center, you’ll get a sample geodatabase and map layers. You’ll also receive one or more map documents to help you visualize the layers in that geodatabase. We also provide documentation and a getting-started guide to help you configure the template in your organization. Templates are not meant to be the whole solution, but they are meant to get you started quickly with best practices.

Business Solutions

ESRI’s business solutions include a number of different products. ArcLogistics is a fleet management tool to create optimized routes and efficient schedules. The Business Analyst product suite is used in site evaluation and selection, as well as exploring customer opportunities related to specific locations. A new mapping-focused solution called MapIt is a product for simple database mapping. It was jointly developed by ESRI and Microsoft. MapIt allows you to create maps showing information from Microsoft SQL Server and Excel. It includes access to basemaps, geocoding, and routing services from ArcGIS Online and Bing Maps, as well as ESRI Business Analyst Online API drive-time and ring analysis and demographic data services. MapIt integrates with applications such as SharePoint and has a Silverlight viewer. We see MapIt as a way to propagate more mapping and map literacy in the IT environment.


ArcGIS next Desktop

In the second quarter of 2010, ESRI will release the next version of ArcGIS. This product will reflect many user- requested enhancements. We’re doing an overhaul of the user experience of desktop. We’re also doing a lot of work in the areas of editing, geoprocessing, spatial analysis, and publishing and sharing maps to the server. A major focus is reducing the number of clicks and the number of concepts you need to understand to get your work done.

New tools and features are being added in this release, including fast map display; time visualization; integrated search; improved organization of default menus; the integration of the catalog inside ArcMap; a dynamic table of contents; better maps, reports, and tables; and direct access from the desktop to spatial type data in RDBMSs, enabling advanced SQL functionality.

ArcGIS Innovation

There are a number of themes in the new version which emphasis GeoDesign applications in landscape architecture, i.e.:

Improved Editing Advanced Mapping Spatial Analysis Network Optimization and Analysis A Complete 3D GIS

and many other features leading to improved use for landscape architects.

Collaborative Data Collection

Web editing in the new version will support the notion of collaborative data collection. It allows many people to share and build a common understanding, designing together for a particular geography without being in the same room at the same time.

A Strong Platform for Imagery

In the last two years, ESRI has taken a major strategic direction to improve and integrate imagery directly into the core ArcGIS platform. ArcGIS is a very strong platform for imagery today, and the new version will dramatically improve display speed, integrate on-the-fly image analysis on the desktop, and support massive scalability through the introduction of Mosaics.

Mobile GIS

Blackberries, iPhones, and other mobile devices are exploding in popularity, and ArcGIS is poised to support this explosion. Mobility isn’t just about one niche – mobile GIS will connect everybody. This includes GIS professionals; field-workers, who might just do some GIS data collection and analysis; knowledge workers, who might embed a very simple task associated with geography or geographic information; and finally even execu-tives, who might want to get a real-time view of exactly what’s going on. With the mobile capabilities of next ArcGIS version, anyone can access your services.


Fig. 5: Content is a key component of ArcGIS, which includes easy access to ready-to-use maps and imagery

Supporting Our Users

ESRI is more than simply software – it’s an organization that’s designed to support you, our users. Our other goals also continue to be the same: advancing GIS and geographic science, spatially integrated thinking, and supporting our employees in their growth and their own professional development. This year, ESRI is 40 years old. It’s important to know that we are unchanged in our fundamental purpose, which is serving you.

These are difficult times for many organizations, but I want to assure you that ESRI is se-cure, financially sound, and growing as an organization, thanks to you and many of our other relationships.

Professional Services

ESRI is dedicated to helping customers be successful, to realize the full potential of the software. ESRI’s Professional Services’ mission is to support customers and business partners around the world in the effective use and application of ESRI software products, as well as to use the lessons learned from projects to influence software development. Today, the division comprises some 600 domain specialists and GIS / IT professionals, located in more than a dozen cities in the United States and several overseas. The division’s activities range from providing focused and advanced support under extended support programs to carrying out large database and system development projects. In many cases, projects involve the implementation of ArcGIS software in mission-critical enterprise


environments. ESRI teams with its more than 2,200 business partners to further expand its consulting capacity and capabilities to ensure that customers are fully supported.

User Communities

When we talk about designing powerful and effective GIS systems, this is largely about you – the GIS professional and your work. ESRI is not the expert here; you are. ESRI provides software tools, training, support, best practices, data, services, and other components to support you in building, maintaining, and growing your GIS systems. But we have always felt that one of our biggest, most important contributions to your success is building and supporting communities.

How you design your systems, maps, databases, and the governance systems that make these things work – this is some of the most valuable geographic knowledge of all. Your investment can be summarized and shared with other GIS users as best practices, streamlining the development of their systems. There are many opportunities for you to learn from the best practices of other users – that is the basis of ESRI’s community building. Our international and regional user conferences, user group meetings, online sharing opportunities, publications, and more, have proved highly successful at connecting you to other users, and our commitment to these valuable forums remains steadfast.

References

Dangermond, J. (2009): GIS: Designing our Future. ArcNews, ESRI, Summer 2009.

Dangermond, J. (2009): GIS: Design and Evolving Technology. ArcNews, ESRI, Fall 2009.

Ervin, S. M. & H. H. Hasbrouck (2001): Landscape Modeling: Digital Techniques for Landscape Visualization. McGraw-Hill Professional Architecture Series. ISBN: 0-07-135745-9.

Flaxman, M. (2010): Fundamentals in GeoDesign. In Buhmann, E., Pietsch, M. & E. Kretzler (Eds.): Peer Reviewed Proceedings Digital Landscape Architecture 2010, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences. Berlin / Offenbach: Wichmann, 28-41.

McHarg, I. L. (1971): Design with Nature . American Museum of Natural History, 197.

Steinitz, C.. Arias, H.. Bassett, S., Flaxman, M., Goode, T., Maddock, T., Mouat, D., Peiser, R, & A. Shearer (2003): Alternative Futures for Changing Landscapes. Island Press, January 1.

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