Article pp.141-143 du Vol.22 n°2 (2012)

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I

NTRODUCTION

Geodesign as a platform for the design and planning of sustainable communities represents a renewed approach, and provides a framework for addressing current urban and environmental problems. Geodesign is an emerging and evolving concept that aims to address key issues that impact the planning and management of human settlement and activities, by bridging the gap between geographic information sciences and spatial design. Indeed, even thoughone of the first GISs was designed in the sixties at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics¹, based on the innovative work of Ian McHarg², GIS tools are still not used very often by the community of spatial designers.

Carl Steinitz from the Harvard Graduate School of Design considers that

“Geodesign is geography by design”. As a matter of fact, Geodesign does not really refer to a new concept. Neverthelessa new dynamic that aims at providing significant updates had started in December 2008 at the NCGIA special meeting on

“Spatial Concepts in GIS and Design³”. Following this meeting, the first Geodesign Summit⁴ took place in Redlands (CA) in January 2010, followed by a second and a third edition in 2011 and 2012.

Geodesign was defined by Mike Flaxman (from MIT) as “a set of techniques and enabling technologies for planning built and natural environments in an integrated process, including project conceptualization, analysis, design specification, stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation (among other stages). Geodesign is a design and planning method which tightly couples the creation of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts”⁵ GeoDesign (the big D one⁶) as a creative, deliberative, uncertain, multi-actors, multi-scale and multi-thematic process, needs an innovative theoretical basis, tools, and supporting practices in order to fit its complex requirements.

The main aim of this special issue of the Revue Internationale de Géomatique is to explore Geodesign as a new challenging field for geographic information

1. Chrisman N. (2005). Charting the Unknown: How computer mapping at Harvard became GIS. ESRI Press.

2. McHarg I. (1965). Design with Nature, Wiley & Sons.

3. http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/scdg/

4. http://www.GeoDesignsummit.com/

5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDesign

6. Goodchild M. (2010). Towards GeoDesign: Repurposing Cartography and GIS?

Cartographic Perspectives, 60, p. 55-69.

Cet article des Editions Lavoisier est disponible en acces libre et gratuit sur archives-rig.revuesonline.com

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142 RIG. Volume 22 – n° 2/2012

sciences, methods, and technologies. This issue has seven papers. The first two papers provide theoretical inputs and historical perspectives on Geodesign; the two following focus on methodological approaches; and the last three papers present technological innovations intended to support the Geodesign practices.

More precisely, Naicong Li, Stephen Ervin, Michael Flaxman, Michael Goodchild, and Carl Steinitz have designed and developed an application of an

“Ontology for Geodesign”. To be useful and efficient, Geodesign as an emerging and evolving concept needs solid and shared concepts, terms, and models. Both the ontology proposed and the website developed in this first paper aim at helping practitioners and researchers to better understand each other and then to work together more efficiently. David Tulloch in his paper entitled “Geographic information systems and landscape architectural design and scholarship: A source of heritage and tension” examines the successes and failures in landscape architecture’s relationship with GIS. He shows to what extent this historical analysis could help the community to build Geodesign by identifying potentially important elements for this innovative and emerging field.

Constance C. Bodurow moves to a more applied approach based on Detroit’s first Net Zero Energy Community use case. She describes the Ci methods and interface that have developed by her studio. She argues that combining urban design, architecture, and engineering in a value- and resource-based, community-driven process provides significant inputs to feed the current reflections on Geodesign.

Following the same idea of driving the Geodesign process from the community’s values and needs, PlanYourPlace is a geospatial infrastructure for sustainable community planning proposed by Andrew J.S. Hunter, Stefan Steiniger, Beverly A.

Sandalack, Steve H. L. Liang, Lina Kattan, Amer S. Shalaby, Francisco Alaniz Uribe, Coral A.M. Bliss-Taylor, and Ryan Martinson. Based on the case of the sustainable urban development of established neighbourhoods in the City of Calgary, Canada, this fourth paper describes a framework that outlines requirements and constraints for a Web-accessible planning platform. This framework especially considers the citizen as a contributor to the planning and development process, and usesdata from location-based social networks and media.

The fifth paper, as the two following, focuses on a technological innovation developed to support Geodesign practices. As in the case of PlanYourPlace, the WikiGIS proposed by Wided Batita, Stéphane Roche, Yvan Bédard, and Claude Caron is based on a Web 2.0 platform. WikiGIS’s strength lies in its ability to ensure traceability of changes in spatio-temporal geographic components generated by users (geometric location and shape; graphics: iconography; descriptive semantics). This papers pecifically highlights how WikiGIS may be an innovative support for collaborative Geodesign. Then, Andres Sevtsuk and Michael Mekonnen propose a new open-source toolbox for ArcGIS named Urban Network Analysis (UNA). This toolbox can be used to compute five types of network centrality measures on spatial networks: Reach, Gravity Index, Betweenness, Closeness, and Straightness. Compared to existing network-analysis tools, and for Geodesign

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Introduction 143

purposes, the strength of UNA tools lies in their capacity to include a third network element – buildings – that can be used as the spatial units of analysis for all measures. The last paper, by Bruno St-Aubin, Mir Mostafavi, and Stéphane Roche, deals with a Collaborative Geospatial Augmented Reality System that aims to supporturban design practice. The proposed solution is based on a collaborative geospatial augmented-reality application that integrates innovative technologies of augmented reality with 3D modelling and spatial-analysis tools.

As the editors of this collection, we express our hope that these papers will lead to greater awareness of the concept of Geodesign, more extensive efforts to elaborate its essential principles, and further progress in the development of tools that are consistent with its objectives. The past four years have seen a strong and compelling beginning to what promises to be a significant new initiative in the design professions.

Stéphane ROCHE

Centre de recherche en géomatique and Département des sciences géomatiques

Université Laval, Québec Michael GOODCHILD

Center for Spatial Studies and Department of Geography University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

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