|
BOOKS INDEX PAGE
Planning Support Systems
Order this title
Integrating Geographic Systems, Models, and Visualization Tools
Land-use professionals from every field and at every
level -- from urban planners to commercial developers to transportation
system engineers -- are increasingly turning from traditional modes of
planning to computer technology. As they do, they are finding
extraordinarily detailed visualizations, animated and manipulable 3-D
models, and the vast databases and supermaps of geographic information
systems (GIS) to help them.
Increased efficiency at every stage of the planning
process is the most obvious advantage of these powerful new tools, but
other, more subtle ones are just as valuable: the intersection of planning
and technology, for example, is helping integrate the work of everyone
involved in the planning process, making it easier for planners to plan
with the people in their communities, not just for them. Citizen-planners
can now virtually walk, drive, or fly through models of their communities;
move buildings from block to block, or tear them down entirely; build
complete subdivisions wherever they want them; run new highways in and
around town -- simultaneously seeing with their own eyes the consequences
of their actions.
About the editors:
Planning Support Systems offers views of all these
new possibilities for land-use planning from the acknowledged experts in
the field. Richard Brail of Rutgers University's Edward J.
Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and Richard
Klosterman of the University of Akron, have assembled papers from
colleagues around the globe who are working to expand both the
applicability and understanding of the most important issues in
computer-aided planning.
|
