Global Network for Rebuilding Rooted in Landscape Architecture Tradition

Providing Aid to Devastated Communities

By Jay Craig, Director, Global Network for Rebuilding

Landscape architecture is a profession wedded to the ever-changing requirements of public service and the need to develop new capabilities to address them. It was landscape architects who utilized transparent overlays of maps to analyze environmental conditions during the 1960s that inspired other landscape architects to use computers and develop GIS for land analysis in the 1970s. Classmates who studied landscape architecture at Harvard University during this period innovated GIS technology in the 1980s and 1990s and made it accessible to the profession at large.

The Global Network for Rebuilding (GNR) of Birmingham, Alabama, seeks to build upon this tradition of innovation and service on behalf of needy communities around the world. An organization of students, instructors, practicing landscape architects, urban planners, engineers, and cartographers, the GNR includes innovative minds and GIS technology centered on rebuilding blighted neighborhoods. Skills and techniques in mapping and communicating information about the land are valuable and can make a significant difference for war-torn countries such as Bosnia or inner-city communities in America.

There are more and more opportunities for landscape architects to use GIS as the technology gains broader acceptance. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a GIS database had to be prepared for any given site, requiring much labor and technical training that was not available in many corporate and municipal landscape architecture departments. Correspondingly, college landscape architecture departments taught traditional design, with little time left to justify spending much on GIS.

However, most cities have since converted to digital maps, providing planners with a technology unencumbered by high front-end costs of data preparation. Additionally, GIS hardware and software are easier to obtain and use. Cities wish to hire designers that use the technology because of its ability to increase productivity. For these reasons, universities now have students demanding access to a good classroom GIS experience.

Hand-in-hand with these developments, the GNR, a nonprofit organization established in 1994, offers a variety of educational experiences to students of planning and design, focusing on the needs of some devastated communities outside the United States (see "Multidisciplinary Team Develops Sarajevo Site Plan"), as well as blighted inner cities of America. GNR gives students the opportunity to work on designs for real-world projects, with the goal of developing strategies for rebuilding that go beyond steel and concrete and extend to creating conditions that will unite people of different backgrounds working to make their communities stronger.

With the help of concerned companies such as Esri, the GNR has been able to deliver GIS software and training to dozens of land planning students and professionals from 10 countries on three continents.

GIS and the Internet make this exercise in global design networking feasible, but it would not be meaningful without the leadership of Dr. Art Rice and Dr. Shishir Raval of North Carolina State University; Dr. Bob Dyck, Dr. John Randolph, and Patrick Miller of Virginia Tech; Max Conrad of LSU; and Dr. Tom Baucom of Jacksonville State. Dr. David Johnson, a retired professor of urban planning at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and a past president of the Fulbright Society, will employ his experience in distance learning to enable participants to review GIS maps and confer on land issues from remote locations.

The Global Network for Rebuilding welcomes the interest of all designers and programmers who would like to explore new ways to use GIS and the Internet to expand the power and reach of our profession.

For more information, contact the Global Network for Rebuilding (tel.: 205-933-2159, e-mail: bbtf@alabama.com, Web: www.friends-partners.org/bosnia).

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