Visioning and Visualization: People, Pixels, and Plans

By Michael Kwartler and Gianni Longo

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2008, 104 pp., $35 paperback.

The last 20 years have brought a blossoming of citizen-planning processes and an array of innovative tools that help citizens understand future development. “Visioning,” scenario planning, charrettes, computer-based simulations — these and other techniques have given ordinary people a better handle on how to shape cities and regions.

In Visioning and Visualization, Michael Kwartler, founding director of the nonprofit Environmental Simulation Center in New York, and Gianni Longo, founding principal of New York-based ACP Visioning + Planning, lead readers through a wide variety of visioning and visualization techniques. Longo, a familiar figure to many new urbanists, helped orchestrate one of the first successful, large community visioning exercises in the early 1980s — in then-beleaguered Chattanooga, Tennessee. A small group of Chattanooga civic leaders began meeting weekly “in an open-salon manner in a vacant storefront,” Kwartler and Longo write. Soon, “more residents joined in, forming the second ring of participants.” From this came the nucleus of “Vision 2000,” a program that by the mid-1990s earned national recognition for reviving a troubled old industrial city. Longo has since introduced community visioning to numerous other locales.

In their short, generously illustrated book, Longo and Kwartler explain how the public has become increasingly engaged in community and regional planning. Whereas formal public hearings in the 1950s and 1960s tended to accept public input grudgingly or perfunctorily, today’s visioning exercises invite a broad cross-section of the population to help set the planning agenda. Planning has become much more democratic. To make this approach successful, visioning processes employ visualization techniques that are much more communicative than the maps, plans, and other two-dimensional representations of olden days.

The authors explain how three-dimensional visual simulations came about and how they work. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and computer-aided drafting (CAD) play crucial roles. They help show the public — in enough detail to be effective — what a place will look like if certain decisions are made about future development. “The process of decision making is becoming increasingly transparent, with the public becoming involved early in the process,” Kwartler and Longo observe.
As the tools have improved, the time needed to obtain feedback from the citizens has been dramatically shortened. “While at one time it took several meetings to enable the public to make decisions, today feedback occurs instantaneously, enabling the same group of people to test alternatives and make informed decisions within a single meeting,” the authors write.

The book contains illustrations demonstrating, among other things, the results that can be attained through digital simulation techniques. Computer-generated axonometric drawings of Lower Manhattan, for example, gave New Yorkers an awareness of where overbuilding had taken place and where buildings had not yet filled their zoning envelopes. One invention that’s proven to be a boon to citizen-planners is “real-time animation.” Viewers can, in effect, walk through the streets and public spaces of a project before it’s built. Thus the community quickly notices conditions that would have been hard to discern in the old days of static, two-dimensional presentations.

The book, which grew out of workshops at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, concludes with four case studies illustrating how visioning and visualization have worked in southwest Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Kona district in Hawaii; the Near Northside of Houston; and metropolitan Baltimore.
At times, Visioning and Visualization can be daunting reading for those with little technical background and limited planning experience. The text is dense with acronyms like “PDDSS” (planning and design decision support systems) and terms such as “prepathed animation” and “a center-out approach to decision making.” There are tightly packed sentences like this: “Two-dimensional mapping and analytical software GIS are linked with 3D interactive simulation software, to allow users to think, design, analyze, and experience place in both 2D and 3D for a more holistic approach to planning.”
Nonetheless, in just 104 amply illustrated pages, Kwartler and Longo provide a useful, concise overview of what is, by its very nature, a complicated topic: the transformation of planning by intensely participatory processes and by ever more sophisticated presentation techniques.