The place that we live affects our access to jobs and public services, culture, shopping, education and our feeling of personal safety, security and health. Balancing access and limiting economic segregation is a daunting task for urban planners. Throw in the need to balance economic growth with environmental impacts, and the parameters grow exponentially.
V1 Magazine editor, Matt Ball, sat down with Ken Snyder, executive director of PlaceMatters, to delve into the decision support tools that are being applied in order to balance a variety of perspectives.
V1 Magazine: How did PlaceMatters get its start?
Snyder: PlaceMatters originated around the connection between land use
and resource use, and looking at the tools that are available to help
people make better land use planning decisions. There was a pretty
quick attraction to working with communities that are dealing with high
growth pressures, whether it’s small communities or large communities.
We have a close connection with the Orton Family Foundation and they’re
interested in serving communities with a population of 50,000 or less.
But we found that a lot of the innovative applications and ideas are
happening in the bigger cities. So there’s a lot of interest in working
with them and developing cutting edge approaches to land use planning.
V1 Magazine: I recently read an article in Seed magazine titled, “The
Living City.” The author discussed a growing area of research that is
applying a rule of biology, that the larger animals are the much more
efficient animals, to the study of cities. I thought that was a
fascinating observation, saying that the larger a city gets, the more
efficient it gets, and the more environmentally friendly it is because
of the condensed population.
Snyder: If you look at really big cities, New York, Chicago and San
Francisco in particular, and their overall resource use per capita
compared to other cities or people living in the rural parts of the
country, their environmental footprint is much smaller. This is usually
because urban dwellers don’t have far to drive but also just because of
the efficiencies of resources.
V1 Magazine: Is there any kind of a movement afoot, with people wanting to live in more urban or rural environments?
Snyder: Well it’s an interesting question, and I think you have people
going both directions. We’re working in Steamboat Springs, Colo., where
they continue to see a huge increase in population growth each year.
And a number of people that are moving there are people who have very
high level professional jobs, where their home base is in Chicago but
they’re able to do 90% of their work remotely.
These professionals have purposely sought out a small town feel and a
small town community, but they’re earning the salary of a high-end
urban resident. They’re causing a ripple effect of both bringing in
resources to the community but also a pressure because they can afford
to buy a house that the local storeowner in Steamboat can’t afford. As
a result, the housing prices are going up because all these people want
to live there.
But then you have other people who want the hustle and bustle and the
excitement of an urban center and cultural resources that they wouldn’t
find in a small town. There’s an interesting dynamic there because
there are pressures both directions. I think it’s the sleepy farm towns
and ranch towns that probably are losing out the most in terms of where
people want to live.
With the Internet and all of the technologies that are helping us
communicate and do things in a more flexible manner, we have more
choices on where we want to live and for some people that’s a very
urban environment and for others it’s a small town environment.
V1 Magazine: How would you define smart growth for a mountain resort community?
Snyder: A lot of attention is given to ways to minimize the
environmental impacts of growth and development. Creating denser, more
inward growth and "grow up rather than out" strategies are
definitely pursued.
But it’s more complex than that. It’s thinking about how to make it
easier for people to do everything in a more efficient way. Mixed-use
development is a big thing, where people can easily get a lot of the
things they want within walking distance from their home, and they can
work close to home.
All of those things make for a much more efficient community and a
tighter community. Figuring out how to cluster things is important,
instead of having single-family homes where everybody has their two
acres of land and a fenced yard. Having smaller yards but a shared
common space, makes it easier for people to enjoy the area with less of
an impact on things.
We always talk about how any community that’s featured in Outside
magazine as a top ten place to live is going to then be bombarded with
people who have the resources to just pick up and move to a place like
that. On one level it really helps the economy of that community
because there’s an influx of people who want to move there. But it has
a negative impact in terms of housing prices going up and people who
have lived there all their life, or several generations, often find
themselves squeezed out.
V1 Magazine: I imagine that the focus of your organization and the way
people live is wildly different than the much more urban areas of say
Europe and other countries. Do you get exposure to how other countries
deal with planning issues?
Snyder: In 2001, I got a fellowship called the German Marshall Fund
Environmental Fellowship from the Center for Clean Air Policy. This
program brought seven Americans to Europe, and seven Europeans to
America every year. I went to the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland,
and the United Kingdom to study land use planning, but also to meet
with people who are also working with this whole field of decision
support tools and planning tools.
The Netherlands in particular provided a feeling of awe and amazement
at how some of these communities have maximized the use of bicycle use
and pedestrian-friendly environments. I keep hoping to find ways to
bring some of that to the United States. Culturally it’s such a huge
difference in terms of how people use bikes to get places. But I think
there were a lot of interesting things to learn in terms of how you
might design a community that encourages bicycle use and more
sustainable community living.
V1 Magazine: Was the fellowship centered specifically on land use planners for that exchange?
Snyder: Yes, the focus was on land use planning and transportation. My
fellowship was probably more focused on the tools and technology that
can be used for planning than most of the other fellows. They’ve had a
pretty impressive list of fellows, including people like Earl
Bloomenauer who is now a U.S. congressman representing Oregon.
V1 Magazine: How did your focus on decision support tools come about?
Snyder: I came from the U.S. Department of Energy where I was working
for a program that focused specifically on sustainable development. One
of the areas that I was asked to look at was the connection between
land use and energy use. I began researching the tools that help people
understand that link, which got me interested in the field of decision
support. In particular, computer mapping tools that allow people to do
spatial impact analysis and scenario planning and look at different
scenarios and understand the implications of different types of
development approaches.
I started PlaceMatters in 2002, with the idea of creating an
organization that was tool neutral and looked at the whole world of
tools that help communities with land use planning. I provided advice
on tools that are a good fit to address land use planning and community
development challenges.
In 2004, I joined the Orton Family Foundation and helped them create a
tools program. And that tools program had a lot of the same sort of
components of what PlaceMatters is about, but under the Orton Family
Foundation’s umbrella there was a much stronger focus on small
communities and then also geographically they look at the Rocky
Mountain west and New England as their two primary target areas.
The Orton Family Foundation was heavily invested in the development of
CommunityViz software, because they felt like it was an important way
to equip particularly these small towns with the resources to do
scenario planning. When PlaceMatters joined with Orton it was right at
the same time that they were deciding to shift from focusing solely on
the development of CommunityViz software and expanding to build a more
mission driven plan to work directly with communities on their
projects.
At that point CommunityViz was a mature product and was ready to be
marketed and sold in the planning world. Place Ways, is responsible for
Community Viz with the Foundation continuing to fund the development,
but on an order of magnitude smaller than it used to.
We’ve all used CommunityViz and we work closely with Place Ways, but we
are also keeping open to other tools that might be a particularly good
fit for land use planning projects.
V1 Magazine: Is 3D modeling a key component of these tools?
Snyder: The original concept of CommunityViz in 1995 was a cutting
edge idea at the time. The idea was that communities needed a tool that
helped them do mapping and do impact analysis but also connect that
with 3D visualization so that when you build something you can actually
see what it might look like in a 3D landscape. The third component that
they have, which was actually really interesting but also really hard
to get planning agencies to adopt and use, was a predictive modeling
tool that would help people understand if you adopted certain policies,
whether it’s an urban growth boundary or a historic preservation or
some sort of policy, what sort of growth might you see happening as a
result of that policy. Those three pieces fit together in an
interoperable way that is actually quite cutting edge.
In the Community Viz 3D visualization part, when I first saw it ten
years ago it was the kind of thing that everybody got very jazzed and
excited about because it was just starting to get into this realm where
you could actually imagine what something would look like. Today the 3D
component of CommunityViz is kind of behind the times because there are
a number of other tools that allow you to create 3D models much more
cheaply and easily. So actually CommunityViz is looking at ways to
adopt some of these other tools that are available.
The idea is that it’s not just visualization tools for the sake of
being able to see the way something look, but how to connect that
visualization with information and data. That’s one thing we’re
starting to see more and more of, even with tools like Google Earth
where it’s mostly visual and you can fly around and navigate it. But
they’re making it possible to associate data with the buildings that
you put on your landscape and that makes it more possible to do impact
analysis in connection with that 3D world, or to just play around with
different scenarios.
V1 Magazine: Having in-depth analysis and predictive modeling tools
for urban planning excites me, because to my mind a majority of GIS
users aren’t conducting analysis. They’re really using such a small
segment of the tool’s functionality.
Snyder: We see that over and over again, GIS people are just barely
scratching the surface. It’s mostly generating maps so they can then
put them out, and there’s not a lot of interactivity with that data.
Playing around with different possibilities makes the tool become much
more powerful. Combining that with visualization tools allows you to
start seeing what various plans look like in terms of infrastructure
costs. For instance you can see the impacts of plans that add children
to your population so that you see when you’re going to hit the
threshold when you need to build a new school. All these questions can
be looked at as you’re playing around with different land uses. That’s
one of the things we think is really powerful about decision support
tools.
V1 Magazine: In addition to helping community planners use these
tools, aren’t you also involved in using these tools to engage
community involvement?
Snyder: Yes, we’re working to develop e-participation tools and
techniques to support and improve the planning process. We strongly
believe that if more people are engaged and involved in the process
that you’re going to make better decisions. You’re also going to make
people feel like they own the process and the decisions, and therefore
you’re more likely to ensure that policies and ideas are implemented.
There’s a really important dance between professionals who have been
trained to do urban design, and the public who have a certain amount of
knowledge about what’s great about the place. The public knows what’s
unique about the place, and has a historical understanding of their
community. The public needs to be tapped into when you’re thinking
about the future of that community.
Public participation tools in combination with professional tools and
professional expertise ensure that you have a really good product
coming out of the design process.
V1 Magazine: Our publication plans to focus on the process of
infrastructure creation and maintenance and the CAD and GIS toolset
that is used for this purpose. The CAD/GIS divide still seems to be an
ongoing problem, particularly in the urban planning community. Do you
think it is time for this divides to come apart, and is there any
momentum for that within the urban planning community?
Snyder: I think it probably has to do with standards and how metadata
is stored and how the programs end up helping clean up the stuff that
the human hand does. One of the problems we keep running into with the
CAD/GIS divide is that someone will do a whole plan in CAD and then
when we try to bring it into GIS to do the impact analysis we get these
fragmented files. We’ll have all the polygons fragmented because they
weren’t created with GIS in mind.
Software companies should work to create tools that work behind the
scenes, so the user doesn’t have to know it’s happening. That would
make the data more interoperable and the divide able to dissolve more.
This largely depends on the big developers of these tools, figuring out
how to make sure that they talk to each other a little bit more.
If that happens then we’ll see people using these tools back and forth.
V1 Magazine: GIS modelers have largely been focused on modeling the
Earth and building facades, while the CAD community has detailed
building interiors. It’s obvious that both communities stand to gain by
bringing their models together.
Snyder: Different levels of analysis require different data. But it’s
difficult to go in and out of different scales. For instance, we’re
doing a project in Chula Vista where the Gas Technologies Institute is
doing very sophisticated analysis of buildings. They’re doing 24-hours,
365 days a year analysis of those buildings and what different
technologies will improve the energy use of those buildings.
We take that data, and those models and bring them into CommunityViz
and are trying to show in an aggregate what sort of energy savings you
could have if you tweak a few of the technologies or adopt
photovoltaics on the rooftops or if they bring in technology on more of
a neighborhood scale. Jumping back and forth between those scales is
challenging, but the potential is huge for us to then think about
things with much more of a big-picture approach.
V1 Magazine: Can you tell me more about this project?
Snyder: It’s an eco-industrial park. One company’s waste could be
another company’s resource, so you can design a clustering of
industries together in such a way that they have less waste and would
be sharing each other’s resources. Why not be able to do that also with
neighborhoods and also think about a transportation system and how to
make these pieces fit together?
When people have a house that’s designed in a certain way it encourages
them to live more sustainably. We also need to look at how can you also
bring that thinking to the neighborhood scale. So it’s not just when
they’re in their home but how they get to work and once they get to
work – it’s the bigger picture.
V1 Magazine: There’s a coming together of a lot of disciplines for
that big picture approach. Have you seen more interest in what you’re
doing and more opportunities for collaboration from people that you
wouldn’t have seen before?
Snyder: I think so. A colleague of mine talks about how it takes
diversity to manage diversity. I think as our lives become more and
more complex, it’s becoming harder to plan because we know more about
the negative environmental impacts of the things that we do.
As we gain more knowledge of the interconnection between these
different sectors, we need tools that will help us make those linkages
more easily and quickly. I think that’s where there’s a very big
interest in figuring out how to bring these ideas together.
The hard part is that often the bureaucracies and the agencies that are
responsible for certain things are still very compartmentalized. For
instance, we have a huge program called Bridging the Divide that looks
at bringing ecosystem-based management more effectively into land use
planning. On the technical side there’s some great tools that help you
think about an ecosystem and make sure that you’re making decisions
that will if not enhance that ecosystem at least help protect it.
But then bringing that into the land-use planning world you run into
all of these problems in terms of what’s the decision-making timeline
for a planning agency versus the decision-making timeline for ecosystem
management, who’s in charge of various decisions. And so you run into
these political barriers, or even jurisdictional barriers where the
watershed or the ecosystem crosses three jurisdictions so you have a
hard time getting all three of those jurisdictions to work together on
the right sort of strategy.
So it’s bringing the science and the tools but also the political arena
all together that continues to be a challenge. But at least with these
tools you’re more and more able to at least provide the right
information to each other.
V1 Magazine: It sounds like a daunting task to just bring together
planning disciplines. Does it get much more complicated when you add
public participation?
Snyder: One of the side benefits of encouraging public participation
is that by the nature of inviting people to the table you’re also
inviting all of these different professions to come and be part of the
conversation. On the first level you have them contributing to the
conversation and saying wait you need to think about this or that,
because they bring in their expertise.
The other thing that happens is that they remember who was at the
meeting and they may remember talking to Joe who is connected with the
environment. And so it becomes more of a community that’s connected and
thinking about these issues in a bigger picture. There’s also that
long-term benefit of people talking to each other and maybe getting
outside of their normal smaller perspective of things.
V1 Magazine: PlaceMatters is involved on a number of different levels,
from tool consulting to hosting Web services to community interaction
and conference organization. How do you balance all of the different
arms of your organization?
Snyder: A combination of grants from foundations help us with
mission-driven initiatives or things that are outside of the boundaries
of what you can usually get funded for in terms of a project. Then
there’s a fee-for-service component that is probably about half of our
budget where we’re doing a project specifically for a community or for
another organization.
My ideal, is 50% of fee-for-service and 50% grants, because if it was
all fee-for-service, we would be too caught up in how to make a dollar
and we would really be trying to get things through quickly in and out
the door. Whereas if we were all grant driven we’d be spending all of
our time writing grant proposals and talking about theory but not
putting it into practice.
With a certain amount of fee-for-service projects we feel like we have
a legitimate argument to make for what works and what doesn’t work
because we’ve tried it. For instance, if it weren’t for the hundred or
so keypad polling events that we’ve done it would be a lot harder to
talk about the benefits and the shortcomings of keypad polling for the
process of engaging public input.
The place that we live affects our access to jobs and public services, culture, shopping, education and our feeling of personal safety, security and health. Balancing access and limiting economic segregation is a daunting task for urban planners. Throw in the need to balance economic growth with environmental impacts, and the parameters grow exponentially.