Exploring the Role of Geospatial Tools for Urban Planning

Ken Greenberg, an architect and urban designer with his own firm Greenberg Associates, recently spoke at the GeoWeb Conference. Greenberg has worked on many large-scale and high profile projects, including Boston’s Crossroad Initiative for the Big Dig and the Vision Plan for the District of Colombia. V1 Editor Matt Ball spoke with Greenberg about the role of geospatial tools and methodology in his work, and about the factors of sustainable planning.

V1: I’m impressed by the scope and scale of your work. At V1 Magazine, we’re focused on the use of the geospatial toolset for sustainability issues. I see that you’ve worked on a lot of master plans in large cities, and high profile projects with sustainability aims. Can you talk about some of your current projects?

Greenberg: I’ll mention one project that’s probably one of the largest and most complex that I’ve ever been involved in. It’s called the Lower Don Lands, and it involves relocating the Don River as it comes into Toronto Harbour. In the early part of the 20th Century this area was a vast wetland. In those days, they called it a “swamp,” and did not understand its value as a natural resource, they filled it in to create a huge industrial area, which because of the Depression and changes in marine technology never really took off. To make a long story short, they had turned the river at right angles in an industrial channel into the harbour and created a lot of problematic conditions including a lot of material that had to be dredged.

Fast-forward to the beginning of the 21st Century, and Waterfront Toronto, which is an agency funded by federal government, provincial government and the city have been looking at re-developing this part of the waterfront as a key strategic reserve of land. This project involves, among other things, moving the river and creating a natural estuary where it comes into the harbor, creating habitat areas and about a hundred acres of new parkland. The area would also include a complete new urban infrastructure with new transportation, housing for about 25,000 people and about 10,000 employees, a whole range of shopping, schools, libraries, day care, and cultural amenities.  The planning requires the full range of things one would have to do to make this viable, with all the things that would be required for a new neighborhood as well as decontamination of the land.

Our team was created with an extraordinary range of disciplines including some people who are on the science end of things, the physics and biology of the river, the hydrology as well as all the usual components of city-building. This has made me more aware than ever of the need to correlate different kinds of information and be able to interact in a large complex teams and do iterative problem solving where this great range of variables are in play.

V1: We’re enthusiastic about geospatial data sharing between the toolsets of CAD and GIS. Have you been using GIS yourself?

Greenberg: I’m an urban designer. Certainly, all the teams that I work on make heavy use of GIS technology. I, personally don’t use the technologies, but it’s something that’s been part of all this work.

V1: I imagine with as many different disciplines and technologies that interoperability and web-based collaboration are important.

Greenberg: Absolutely. I didn’t mention that a lot of the demographic, economic, and development feasibility data are also prime considerations. So, in trying to formulate ideas about land use mix, and the relationship between transit and land-use, access to census data has been pretty important as well.

V1: You’ve been pulling together these multi- disciplinary teams for some time. Is technology a great aid in doing that?

Greenberg: This is clearly something that is emerging fairly rapidly. When I started doing this work, the ability just to deal with the physical context, never mind all the other kinds of information, was pretty primitive and extremely laborious.

There was a period in the 19th Century and early 20th Century when we had these Sanborn maps and Goads Atlases in Canada, the great old insurance atlases that were done on linen in ink and painstakingly created, but they actually had an enormous amount of information. You could look at these maps, and because they were done by insurers that were concerned about fire, they had what buildings were made of, they had the location of all the stand pipes for fighting fires, they pretty well detailed everything.

Then we went through a long period in the mid- 20th Century when we didn’t have surveys of cities with that kind of information. It really wasn’t until a couple of decades ago, I would say, that the technology has emerged that allows us to have this complex understanding of layers, and, in particular, the play of time. The ability to work in the fourth dimension allows us to see how things have evolved historically and how they will continue to evolve and give people a better sense of how this work actually moves through time, which is absolutely important.

V1: A lot of your work seems to revolve around the interface between waterfronts and cities. That must present some unique opportunities to delve into the urban and natural world interface.

Greenberg: The challenges are different whether it’s a seafront or lakefront or riverfront, but all have issues with the dynamics of the behavior of the body of water, from tides to flood conditions to drought. Dealing with the fluctuations of water level are extremely important and that relates to contaminates being carried in the water and understanding how that works.
Because the issues are so complex and so layered, we tend to work in a very iterative way with a lot of different people with different kinds of expertise. If you remember the days of what used to be called “systems analysis,” where people thought they would describe all the variables and play them out. It’s just too complicated for that, at least in my world. It involves people coming at it from all these different standpoints, layering the information in different layers on drawings or comparatively, and then really searching for understanding of the interactions. At that point, this is not just taking two or three variables, it’s taking a ton of variables all at once and trying to understand where optimum solutions lie.

V1: Have you had an integrative design framework where your people have been able to collaborate through software, or are we still in the early stages of creating such tools?

Greenberg: It’s evolving, but at least in my work, people do truly understand that. You’ve probably seen this diagram, which appears everywhere of three intersecting rings that are often identified as Environment, Society, Economics. I think everyone understands that the critical area is in the overlap of the rings, and it has all kinds of implications for how teams are formed -- who’s working on them, the level of interaction.

The hierarchy has flattened, and you no longer have a single discipline guiding the whole effort, in some kind of rigid hegemony that’s guiding the whole thing with everyone else supporting. The leadership is shifting depending on the issues, so from that standpoint, it’s a pretty exciting time.

V1: There’s also a whole new means to bring the public into the picture, I would imagine.

Greenberg: You’ve raised another huge area, which is that, at least in the Western world, this is frequently all done in a democratic setting. You have to engage a whole array of stakeholders and the public. That requires a certain amount of transparency and simulation of outcomes. The ability to convey a lot of information is really important.

There are a lot of people who have become quite expert in deciphering all this information. First of all, it’s a matter of having the information, but, secondly, to be able to depict or portray it in understandable ways, and that’s bringing with it fascinating challenges. I work a lot with younger people who are incredibly adept at doing visualizations and constantly finding new ways to present information.

We work a lot in 3D, and also with models where you don’t have static views, where you can actually move around the models in all directions and explore things.

V1: Are you affiliated with any sort of research efforts in terms of developing new tools?

Greenberg: I follow and occasionally use things coming out of the media lab at MIT, and there is a group called Space Syntax that is based in the UK, but they have some MIT connections as well. There are a lot of groups that are pushing the envelope pretty forcibly.

There are cities doing this too, and this goes way back. Metro Portland was way ahead, and I’m talking about fifteen years ago when it correlated a lot of GIS information for the whole city region. The whole region around Paris, France has also been a leader in this too. Boston has fairly remarkable resources on the Internet with the information and tools to discover the history of different parts of the city. I think different cities have actually been more adept than others in pushing the technology and also making it available.

V1: Does history guide quite a bit of your work?

Greenberg: It does, because we’re in a period now in North America where we are operating in older built out areas . I don’t deal with a lot of greenfield work. I’m mostly involved in older cities, where I’m adding to layers that already exist. Understanding those layers and when they were created and how they were created and the embedded energy in them that needs to be adaptively re-used becomes really important.

V1: I’m fascinated by the amount of the information that you’re dealing with, particularly the historical layers and dealing with past environmental degradation.

Greenberg: In the Lower Don Lands project that I was describing to you, we’re dealing with a channelized portion of the river and creating a new course that will meander through park land. We’re keeping the channel as part of an overflow system for flood protection, but it will also become an urban canal for new uses. Understanding how it was constructed, what the state of its piling edges are, how it behaves in terms of the new hydrology, all of that becomes really important. They are a number of silos on the industrial site, and we need to understand how they work, how they were built and what we might do with them.

V1: That’s a complex undertaking. Do you interface at all with kind of real-time data feeds? I know particularly in waterways, there’s a movement to use sensors in the water to get real-time information about water quality in areas of reclamation.

Greenberg: I don’t personally, but the hydrologists we’ve been working with are definitely doing that. The same is true for a lot of transportation work, and in the transportation world, the monitoring of vehicular traffic engineering has been way ahead of everything else. We had this incredible preoccupation with cars and measuring everything about behavior of the automobile, but we were really lagging on the public transit and cycling side of things, so there is a big process of catch-up going on where the whole field of transportation, in general, is trying to develop tools for measuring behavior of pedestrian, cyclers, transit and so on in ways that are as sophisticated as the traffic engineering and looking at interactive models that involve all of those modes.

V1: In your role as a master planner, do you interface with a lot of other designers as well as scientists?

Greenberg: And technology people. I know enough about all these things to be dangerous, without being an expert in the technical aspect. I’m in these teams that are really reaching across all the disciplines and learning how to communicate with each other.

In my work, we use a lot of something called, “See and Share,” which is a software which enables people in many different offices to all be on the phone and online at the same time and literally work on the same drawings or project. This kind of capability allows teams to  draw on all different kinds of sources and be formed with people who are in different places but can work really effectively together in real time. We can work quickly without having to fly a lot, and it’s much cheaper, obviously than video conferencing.

When I’m working on these projects, it’s younger people either in the design firms, the architects or the landscape architects, or the engineering firms who are creating a common 3D platform that is layering all the information. Essentially; what we’re able to do is visualize in 3D how many things are behaving.

Some of the stuff, I’ve seen but haven’t personally used yet involves  simulating wind conditions or traffic modeling, where you actually lay out an urban plan on a table in model form, and by having overhead cameras viewing it as you move things around on the model, illustrate for you on the table how patterns will change as a result. So, you can actually see projected how wind patterns would be altered or how traffic movement would be altered.

V1: That’s fascinating. Working with a larger team and seeing how one’s design impacts the other has got to be a learning experience. I imagine if software simulate more causes and effects, then it would save a lot of issues.

Greenberg: I think that there’s an analogy with just the simple use of the Internet. We used to spend a lot of time doing research and digging, and now we can find that information immediately. I think the same thing is happening with the testing of all kinds of hypotheses and variables. What does it mean? What would it do? And the ability to see that pretty quickly is important.

As you walk around the city with a personal device, guiding you by a GPS, you’re getting information and feedback from the environment. There is the real physical environment that you’re seeing, touching, smelling, and then there is all the embedded information about it that you’re receiving. And these things are becoming more and more interactive. It’s almost a little scary.