Digital Technologies in Planning

In his keynote speech Paul Cureton from the University of Lancaster focused on landscape planning, urban design and digital twins and outlined a range of possibilities with emerging digital tools and new data to help us understand and imagine our future world. 

He explained that by making a digital copy of something in the real world, called a digital twin, we can better understand how it functions, how we can fix things and how it might change in the future, for example, with climate change. We can predict futures but also manage and develop spaces through digital twins in planning. The new systems change the traditional processes and approaches in landscape design and it recentres landscape architecture to be at the heart of the planning process so that environmental infrastructure can be put at the centre of future development. He mentioned the geodesign approach — a framework for collaborative decision-making —as a way to co-design digital twins.

Paul Cureton pictured a methodology for a digitally enabled systems approach for urban planning. He also talked about the need for more engagement in planning processes and the need to address underrepresented groups, and that gaming and simulation is a low-cost approach, especially for young people. 

Change the small workflows

Elliot Hartley, from GD3D / Garsdale Design’, a 3D GIS, digital twin and development planning professional, talked about how we instead of trying to solve every problem can look at your own professional life, pick up knowledge and workflows from other disciplines and implement them in our working life. Instead of trying to solve the global challenges we can change our own small workflows over time. 

The wealth of information makes the work and the ability to pick out which things can work difficult. Professions tend to do things in the way that they’ve always been done and often there is little time to experiment and fail. 

3D visualizing

Elliot Hartley who is also an internationally recognised 3D geodesign expert, a pioneer and instructor in the use of Esri’s ArcGIS CityEngine for 3D city modelling and urban planning projects explained that tech companies are very used to build quick - fail fast, but in a planning process that’s not something you can do because of the long-time span. Even so when it comes to new technologies we shouldn’t be distracted by the novelty of the technology but ask what it can bring of experiences about an environment before it is built. If you get a 3D modelling that you can walk around in and get the feeling; oops it feels oppressive here, that’s something you can’t model on a piece of paper.