Although current literature calls' I for ecological sustainability in the built human community, the planning professions have often focused their attention on technological solutions to environmental problems. Other, more viable, solutions may have been overlooked through the lack of tools enabling planners to project and comprehend the complex ecological and social interactions of the urban-suburban environment.
New theory, tools and methods of research in ecological systems promise to improve our understanding of the dynamics of change in urban environments. Specifically, we now have access to a variety of sophisticated computational and theoretical tools for characterizing urban systems at a conceptual level, and for visualizing and understanding these characterizations. An integrated ecological, engineering and social science approach, using dynamic geographic computer modeling techniques and interface systems, would allow researchers and professionals to address urban dynamics in greater detail at a greater variety of scales and interfaces.
This project begins with a multi-disciplinary analysis of current ecological thought within the context of the planning culture to develop a coherent understanding of the term sustainability. Our investigation will integrate two separate bodies of work. Task One will apply recent advances in dynamic ecological modeling techniques to urban systems. There is a history of support for such means of characterizing urban systems. Task Two will present models via different visualization interfaces intended to help policy-makers and citizens better understand and utilize information about predicted outcomes. Our ongoing work suggests that different interfaces best support different types of decisions.
Attention will be focused on key urban sub-systems (e.g. population, employment, economic criteria), land-use regulation, capital investment decisions and geographic constraints as well as individual property decisions (buy/sell, improve/neglect, and change in intensity and type of use) to model changing urban growth patterns. The model will be used to grow a city, most likely East St. Louis, Illinois (part of a University-community partnership, the East St. Louis Action Research Project.) We will explore "exocentric" views such as maps and aerial views as well as "egocentric" interactive, navigable 3-dimensional representations. Using the different interfaces to present policy issues in these cities to citizens and policy-makers, we will study how visualization interfaces communicate complex issues and affect decisions.
