EngagingCities is supported by The Orton Family Foundation, which helps small cities and towns adapt to change while maintaining or enhancing the things they value most. The Orton Family Foundation hosts The Planning Tool Exchange (PlanIt X), a free online database of community planning projects, tools, and resources.We encourage you to browse, comment and contribute to PlanIt X.
Architects’ models and line drawings used to be the only tools we had to help us visualize a proposed building or major streetscaping project. These days, a host of high-tech tools can help us see the changes in 3-D, compare scenarios, fly or walk through a mock-up of the new design, and even interact with a model through an avatar.
If you’re handy with PhotoShop (and an increasing number of people are), it’s not too hard to paste a few trees into a photo of your town’s main street, “repaint” a building, or apply a few other digital tricks to see what simple changes might look like. If you’re really handy with digital images, you can create photorealistic images of major planning changes. Start with a digital image of a street or town and add in new buildings or convert an empty lot to a park to show the effects of streetscaping policies or form-based codes. Communities around the country are using photosimulation (also called photo montage or digital reimaging) to create ultra-realistic images of proposed policies and help residents better understand the impacts of their decisions.
Take your visualizations one step further with CommunityViz, an advanced GIS program that will allow you to create 3-D models of your community and walk or fly through them. Create realistic models of existing or proposed buildings using Sketch-up or other drawing tools, then place them on a map and explore the model in 3-D. CommunityViz is an especially helpful tool for public meetings, where you can project the images on screen and allow community members to explore proposed scenarios along with you, then use advanced analytical tools to compare the costs of various choices, environmental indicators, or other data.
This online virtual reality program lets users take visualization one step further again. It wasn’t designed for planning purposes, but a handful of creative communities are now using this platform to help their residents make informed choices about public spaces. Users can create an account for free, design an avatar, and “travel” to a mock-up of an actual place in their community. Tech-savvy designers can create extremely realistic models of existing or proposed places, and users can then explore and interact with those places in 3-D. Some communities host real-time meetings in SecondLife, allowing users to interact with each other and discuss the future of the place.
Got other examples of great visualization tools or projects? Join us at the Planning Tool Exchange and add your own thoughts and examples!
Talk to us! We’d love to hear your stories and perspectives on engaging community planning. Or send us your post ideas and questions -- there are many ways to get involved.
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Here is another visualization resource you might find useful. It is free, easy to use, comes with an image library, and includes access to training. http://www.csc.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/canvis/