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Track: Local/State Government, Cadastral, Land Records

Mark Sorensen
Geographic Planning Collaborative
1915 Nob Hill Drive
PO Box 388
Running Springs, CA 92382


Telephone: 909-867-7628
Fax: 909-867-5310
E-mail: GPCI@aol.com



GIS and Related Technologies in Planning Towards a New Planning Paradigm

Defining Issue: GIS and other cutting edge technologies are providing the opportunity to reinvent entire professions. Urban and regional planners are in a position to retool their role in the community development and resource management process, should we decide to take the challenge. GIS Solution: Integrated suite of Esri GIS software products, Internet, GPS, multimedia, advanced data capture, and related technologies offers an unprecedented technology palette for planners. This presentation showcased how these tools are being applied in a wide variety of functional applications that have relevance for planners. Methodology: Contemporary city planning methods, and the institutional, administrative, and legal frameworks that support them have been in place for over 70 years. This framework has facilitated the orderly development and expansion of modern day cities through the industrial age. We now live in a rapidly changing technological world, and this presents significant challenges to planners who must understand the implications of such change on behalf of their communities and transform these understandings to the plans, policies, and laws that will guide the community development process into the future. While there have been very interesting planning and design innovations in recent years, the essential paradigm of planning methods and process has not changed much over the past fifty years. Advances in GIS, information management, and communications technologies now provide the tools that we can use to create a more dynamic, flexible, and effective role for planners, if we care to take the challenge. This paper discusses the potential impacts of such technologies, illustrates how these capabilities are being used by "planners" in other fields, and presents ideas for a new city planning paradigm. Software: Examples showcase nearly all of Esri's GIS software products, Internet client and server software, video survey, QTVR, GPS, aerial platform remote sensing, CCTV, and a host of other technologies.



Copyright 1997 Environmental Systems Research Institute