UrbanFootprint and the new shape of scenario planning tools

Posted on by Garlynn Woodsong

Introduction to UrbanFootprint, a next-generation scenario planning tool.

Though the concept of scenario planning has been in use for some two decades in the field of urban and regional planning, it is now becoming part of the professionally-accepted mainstream of the planning profession. With the passage of laws such as SB 375 in California, SB 1059 (as well as other related legislation) in Oregon, and similar legislation in other states, regions must now consider how to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by planning for land use development patterns that will lessen the need for automobile travel, among other GHG-reduction strategies. Scenario planning tools allow regions to compare different urban growth alternatives, to evaluate their performance for a range of metrics, including but not limited to GHG emissions.

UrbanFootprint Scenario Ecosystem

UrbanFootprint Scenario Ecosystem

So, what sorts of advancements have been made in the development of UrbanFootprint to differentiate it from previous-generation scenario planning tools?

Fully open-source software stack.

UrbanFootprint v1.1 Software Stack

UrbanFootprint v1.1 Software Stack

UrbanFootprint is a powerful scenario land use planning, modeling and data organization framework designed to facilitate more informed planning by practitioners, public agencies, and other stakeholders. Its development is led by Calthorpe Associates, a planning and urban design firm with over two decades of experience with regional and urban scenario planning. Built on fully open-source software platforms and tools, UrbanFootprint requires no proprietary software of any kind. It runs on the Ubuntu Linux 64-bit operating system; Postgresql drives the database back-end; this allows for PostGIS to provide GIS functionality; and for Postman to provide multi-user simultaneous editing capabilities. Queries and model logic use a combination of PGSQL and Python; Django, Apache, and Spoutcore interact with Redis Queue and Celery to allow for a web-driven, platform-agnostic user interface that is able to schedule complex server-side tasks and report the results back seamlessly. The map interface is service by Polymaps and Mapnik, interacting with Tilestache; charting is provided by d3. There are essentially no limitations to the amount of hardware that can be deployed on behalf of UrbanFootprint, from a desktop virtual-machine environment to the largest super-computing arrays. This flexibility allows it to be scalable, from analysis of a single development to an entire state, and beyond. Continue reading →

Introduction to open source geospatial tools

Posted on by Jason Lally

While the following tools are not scenario planning tools in their own right, they could grow into frameworks that allow us to do scenario planning with open source tools.  This is a general introduction and roundup of those tools.

CartoDB

CartoDB is a web-based framework for dynamic, data-driven visualizations.  It is an open source tool with a paid hosted version available to users that don’t want to get under the hood or worry about hosting infrastructure.  CartoDB is based on some pretty powerful online geospatial software including PostGIS and PostgreSQL, which together are arguably the open source standard for storing, querying and manipulating geospatial data on the web.  It is primarily built to make visualization of your data super simple and beautiful, but has analytical capabilities as well.  For the novice user, get a free basic account, load some of your own shapefiles and try putting it on a map.  You’ll get some simple embed options and can style the map without touching code (see some examples in the map gallery).  More enterprising users who are comfortable with APIs, SQL queries, javascript and some CSS can take a look at the developer documentation and examples.  Want to really geek out?  Check out the source code of the framework itself and give your hand at installing it yourself.  It’s a bit of an endeavor, so get caffeinated.  You really only need to do this if you are interested in hosting your own CartoDB instance and/or contributing to active development of the framework.

OpenGeo

OpenGeo packages together a number of open source geospatial products into a framework that is useful for the display and analysis of geospatial data on the web.  Each piece of software in the OpenGeo bundle is available as its own open source product.  The benefit of OpenGeo is in the bundling to enable the simple sharing, creation and publishing of geospatial data on the web without configuring all the independent pieces separately.  OpenGeo is available as a free, community product or as a supported enterprise product at varying levels of support and features.  This is useful for larger applications within cities where dedicated support is expected or required.  OpenGeo has been used by a number of public agencies including Portland’s TriMet, NYC’s department of IT, and MassGIS among others.

Quantum GIS (QGIS)

QGIS is a fairly user friendly desktop based GIS software.  It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux with very little configuration (just install the right software and any software it depends on).  QGIS is not as full-featured as its proprietary counterpart ArcMap (although it’s getting there), but it does give you the ability to edit Esri shapefiles.  It also imports and exports to a variety of open formats.  Basic editing, querying, analysis and symbolizing of data is pretty straightforward.  QGIS is also extensible via plugins.  There’s no real scenario planning capability right now, but in theory, plugins could enable QGIS with familiar functionality like dynamic formulas, attribute (land use or placetype) painting and dynamic charts and graphs.

GRASS GIS

Not as user friendly as QGIS, GRASS, however, is strongest in its analytical capabilities.  While it can handle vector and raster data, many of its applications are on raster based data for environmental analyses.  It is a powerful alternative to the spatial analyst extension in Esri’s ArcMap, but does not offer the full functionality of say ArcGIS for Desktop on its own.  Not explicitly a scenario tool, it has been used to look at habitat and other potential environmental outcomes based on different development assumptions.  You can definitely do analysis on a set of assumptions and inputs, but GRASS lacks the full set of features associated with many modern scenario planning tools that would allow a user to capture and represent those scenarios quickly.

These tools, both desktop and web-based, offer a glimpse in to what’s possible in the open source context.  Open source geospatial software continues to mature and become more relevant to planners and GIS professionals every day.  We will continue to track development in the open source geospatial world, particularly as it relates scenario planning and planning generally.  This is by no means an exhaustive list, so please use the comments to highlight other tools that have been or could be useful to planners.  Want more information on open source geospatial tools?  Check out OSGeo, the non-profit organization that supports the collaborative development of open source geospatial software.

Federal Highway Administration seeks MPO partners for scenario planning pilot

Posted on by Jason Lally

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is seeking an Metropolitan Planning Organization from an inland area of the country to investigate and pilot approaches to modeling climate change in a scenario planning project.  Here’s the notice:

Multi-Agency Transportation, Land Use, and Climate Change Scenario Planning Project

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is leading a multi-agency effort to partner with a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) and Federal Land Management Areas in the selected region to conduct a new study to advance the state of practice in incorporating climate change analysis – both mitigation and adaptation – in scenario planning.

FHWA’s Federal partners – the US DOT Volpe Center, US Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, US Forest Service, Federal Transit Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency – will provide technical assistance to the project.

The FHWA will award one grant of approximately $25,000 to $50,000. The goal is to advance the state of practice in incorporating climate change analysis into scenario planning, FHWA and its Federal partners are seeking to implement one pilot project in an inland area of the country. The Federal agencies are seeking to partner with an MPO and Federal Land Management Areas to complete this study. The project will inform transportation and land use decision-making in the selected study area by using scenario planning to analyze strategies to reduce GHG emissions and adapt to climate change impacts.  The goals of the project are to 1) advance climate analysis in scenario planning; 2) develop a transferrable process; 3) build partnerships; and 4) impact decision-making.

Learn more and apply here, applications due May 30, 2013.

Evaluating Interoperating Toolkits in Scenario Planning in J. of Conservation Biology

Posted on by Jocelyn Hittle

Alternative Scenario for BCD RegionAt PlaceMatters’, an important focus of our work is informed decision-making (and the technical tools this sometimes requires). I thought I’d share some more detail on one of our past scenario planning projects, partly because the work–integrating ecosystem and hazard data into traditional planning– was recently published in the Journal of Conservation Biology. Co-authored by Patrick Crist of NatureServe, Kiersten Madden of the University of TX Marine Science Institute, Doug Walker of Placeways, Tashya Allen and Dave Eslinger of NOAA, and myself, the article, “Supporting cross-sector, cross-domain planning through interoperating toolkits,” includes work PlaceMatters (and partners) did to demonstrated the benefits of addressing conservation goals and hazard mitigation simultaneously through a holistic approach to traditional planning. The article focuses on two pilot projects, our work in the Charleston area and the work done by UT in the Mission-Aransas NERR, both funded by the Packard Foundation to investigate the use of tools to improve ecosystem-based management within traditional planning contexts.

I won’t go into the details here (since you can read the paper), but essentially PlaceMatters’ project, called Creating Resilient Communities, first focused on measuring: 1) how well the region would do with respect to the conservation goals identified by a team of regional experts and 2) how many people (particularly vulnerable populations like the elderly or low income households) would live or work in hazard prone areas if growth patterns in the region continued as is. We then suggested an alternative scenario that moved new development out of hazard prone and biologically important areas (which were frequently the same areas) to show how conservation goals and hazard mitigation goals were aligned. In addition to making a case for different growth patterns, the project tested a toolkit of analysis tools–  CommunityViz,  NatureServe’s Vista, and NOAA’s Roadmap for Adapting to Coastal Risk. While we found that they worked reasonably well together, there is still room for additional improvement in interoperability.

Continue reading →

In Chicago for APA National? Check out these sessions…

Posted on by Jason Lally

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs via Compfight cc

Welcome to Chicago! Here’s a quick round up of sessions at APA related to the work and vision of the Open Planning Tools Group.  If you have others, please leave a comment.

Web-Based Fiscal Impact Modeling

Date: Saturday, April 13

Time: 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Incorporating transit into the planning process has typically been an ad hoc activity, constrained by inaccessible and at times non-existent transit and land-use data. Emerging web services and comprehensive datasets provide opportunities to better integrate transit and planning. The purpose of this project is to make complex transit data accessible to planners and decision-makers, and to make use of non-traditional internet sources in planning for transit. This project will result in a web-based tool to visualize transit and land-use characteristics for cities in the United States. The tool combines publicly available sources such as census and transit data along with queries from yelp.com to create a series of visualizations and summary statistics for a user-defined area. This output provides clear and concise information about the transit environment to planners and decision-makers. Moreover, the use of standardized data sources allows conclusions drawn at the local level to be reconsidered comparatively at the regional or national level. The methods identified in this work leverage sophisticated and increasingly available data that the planning profession has yet to fully engage. Continue reading →