An interesting convergence is taking place between GIS and multimedia that holds great promise for planning and urban design visualization on the Web. Planners are beginning to harness GIS to map not only existing conditions but “what if” scenarios under alternative development options, including different densities of development. GIS-generated worlds can be realistic representations of cities or imagined terrain maps showing invisible geography.

A group of urban designers and geographers formed Virtual Environments for Urban Environments (VENUE) at University College, London. Their premise is that GIS can be brought down to the fine scale used in urban design and, coupled with multimedia, become a tool for design and visualization. Particularly valuable will be the ability to study and model the sequences experienced as one moves through urban space. Working with GIS vendor ESRI, they are developing tools for sketch planning with integration of multimedia and immersive imaging techniques.

VENUE: Virtual Environments for Urban Environments, from UCL

Case Study: ESLARP and EGRETS
The East Saint Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) began in 1987 as a community assistance program sponsored by the departments of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The city of East Saint Louis, Illinois, had seen its population decline by nearly one-half between 1960 and 1990, due to industrial abandonment and the consequent migration of blue-collar jobs to other areas. It was considered a prime example of urban blight in America. By 1990, over half the population was living below the poverty level. Unemployment was nearly 30 percent.

The community turned to the university for help but extended this challenge: don’t draw beautiful plans that will rot on the shelf; show us how to use your planning and design tools so that we can rebuild this city ourselves. The project began with a pilot neighborhood planning workshop in the fall semester of 1990 and grew into a comprehensive interdisciplinary program with an on-site, staffed neighborhood technical assistance center.

A component of the project is called EGRETS (East Saint Louis Geographic Information Retrieval System), an innovative program for providing this underserved community with some of the most sophisticated tools of the planning profession. Brian Orland is a professor of landscape architecture and director of the Imaging Systems Lab (IMLab) at UIUC. In 1994 he had a problem that had nothing to do with East Saint Louis: in the strategic land-planning studios he was leading, his students could not afford to plot their color maps. One day, as he walked across the campus to where Mosaic, the first Web browser, was under development at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, he realized that the Web was going to become the ideal platform for publishing GIS information. Soon an intranet was in place to allow sharing of map data between students and faculty, obviating the need for hard-copy prints.

Orland saw an application for this idea in East Saint Louis: “Most people do not know the wealth of information that is available about their community and how it could be useful to them.” He and his colleagues set out to create a Web-enabled educational resource to make mapping data available for this community along with training in how to use it. He designed a Web site that sought to accomplish three things:

Educate people about information and maps and how they can make use of them. For example, knowing the location of toxic waste sites or flood zones would clearly be valuable information for anyone buying a house or locating a business. This became the Tour section of the site. Create an archive of searchable maps that already existed. This became the Atlas section of the site. His team used the Excite search engine to permit natural language searching using metadata. For example, if someone implements a search using the keyword “people,” the search engine associates that with maps containing information about population. Let visitors create their own maps by selecting “themes”—data layers —using a Java-based GIS viewer. This became the Studio section of the site.

left: EGRETS is an innovative program that provides GIS services to the impoverished community of East Saint Louis.

A practical use for the GIS data came into play when the local transit agency was considering extending an existing light-rail line. The Emerson Park neighborhood wanted the line to come through it. They enlisted the EGRETS group and, using detailed maps, showed how the transit line would spur economic development and access to jobs. The transit agency was convinced and rerouted the line through Emerson Park. Now the EGRETS team is conducting surveys of neighborhood conditions. Based on drive-by assessments of visible trash in neighborhoods, they use GIS to generate maps showing the condition of properties throughout the city in a highly visual way. It provides an effective early warning system about neglected properties. The program is an adaptation of Smart Forest, the IMLab’s forest management visualization tools, to the urban environment.

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