6 COVER STORIES The Steinitz Model of Landscape Change 1. How should the landscape be described? 2. How does the landscape operate? 3. Is the landscape working well? 4. How might the landscape be altered? 5. What differences might the changes cause? 6. Should the landscape be changed? Representation Models Process Models Evaluation Models Change Models Impact Models Decision Models GIS: Designing Our Future Continued from cover and inseparable relationship between man and nature.” Fifteen years later, in his groundbreaking book Design with Nature, landscape architect Ian McHarg advocated a framework for design that helps humans achieve synergy with nature. Design and planning that take into consideration both environmental and social issues help us ensure that our resources are used appropriately and responsibly, to help us move toward a better future for all. McHarg’s pioneering work not only had a fundamental influence on the up-and-coming field of environmental planning but simultaneously solidified the core concepts of the young field of GIS as well. In the 40 years since Design with Nature was written, a better world is the common goal all of us—geographers, planners, scientists, and others—have been striving for. Discussing his book during the Keynote Address at the 1997 Esri International User Conference, McHarg laid out a process by which “environmental data could be incorporated into the planning process.” Rejecting the view of a future modeled after some idyllic environmental past, he instead was an early adopter of the view that we should be using our dominance of earth systems to help evolve the natural world and make it better, rather than conquer it. Powerful anthropogenic influence over earth systems represents not just a huge challenge but an equally huge opportunity—not humans versus nature, but humans with nature. “While traditional ecological research selected environments with a minimum human influence, I selected arenas of human dominance,” McHarg said. Today more than ever, it is important to recognize the overwhelming impact of humans on the environment, that massive human impacts on the earth are a fact that’s not going away, and that we stand at the crossroads. Thus, our challenge is to provide designers, engineers, planners, and others, with a set of tools and a framework for designing and managing the anthropogenic earth. Design for the Anthropogenic Earth I’ve recently become very interested in the relatively new field of earth systems engineering and management (ESEM), which concerns itself with the design, engineering, analysis, and management of complex earth systems. ESEM takes a holistic view of multiple issues affecting our earth—not only taking environmental, social, and other considerations into account up front in the design process but also looking at challenges from an adaptive systems approach, where ongoing analysis feeds back into the continual management of the system. Braden Allenby, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University and one of ESEM’s founders, often emphasizes the undeniably dominant role humans have in earth systems. “We live in a world that is fundamentally different from anything that we have known in the past,” says Allenby in his paper “The Metaphysics of the Anthropogenic Earth Part I: Integrative Cognitivism,” “It is a world dominated by one species, its activities and technologies, its cultures, and the integrated effects of its historical evolution.” McHarg was already moving in this direction in the 1960s, and today we understand that it is even more important to emphasize the anthropogenic elements of earth systems. In other words, at this stage of ecological evolution, humans are a significant, if not dominating, component of the natural environment, and all problems need to be addressed and decisions made with anthropogenic elements in the forefront. Allenby sees reasoned design and management in the age of the anthropogenic earth as our moral imperative, but the biggest obstacle to our success is that we are not set up to work, or even think, in this way. “We lack solid data and analytical frameworks to make assertions about the costs, benefits, and normative assessments of different . . . practices,” notes Allenby in “Biomass Management Systems” in Reconstructing Earth. And this is why I believe that GIS and the emerging field of GeoDesign are critical to the success of approaches such as ESEM and other logical and rational models for dealing with the environmental and planning problems of ours and future generations. “We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.” – Bill Joy, Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems Designing Alternative Futures The key to developing a true understanding of our complex and dynamic earth is creating a framework to take many different pieces of past and future data from a variety of sources and merge them in a single system. GIS is a sophisticated technological tool already in widespread use by planners, engineers, and scientists to display and analyze all forms of location-referenced data about the health, status, and history of our planet. GIS enables a GeoDesign framework for analyzing and managing anthropogenic earth issues by allowing users to inventory and display large, complex spatial datasets. They can also analyze the potential interplay between various factors, getting us closer to a true understanding of how our dynamic earth systems may change in the coming decades and centuries. Carl Steinitz, an urban planner at Harvard University, originated many of the early ideas about the application of GIS for landscape analysis and urban planning. Steinitz developed a model of landscape change that enables design of alternative futures. Those alternative designs can then be evaluated in terms of their impact on the natural environment as well as their utility to the human population, and the alternative future that is projected to achieve the best balance can then be selected for implementation. With a debt of gratitude to Steinitz (“A Framework for PLF,” Landscape Future), the GeoDesign framework also lets us design and test various alternatives, helping us make the most educated and informed decisions about the best possible future. Is the earth getting hotter or colder? Is the stress human populations are putting on the planet contributing to climate change? What potential factors may significantly impact our ability to thrive and survive in the future? What additional sorts of environmental monitoring can we be doing today to improve decisions in the future? We are only beginning to understand how to approach these questions, let alone come up with scientifically valid answers. Only through careful observation of the data, application of scientific principles, and using GIS and other technologies do we have any hope of truly understanding the stressors and impacts on the incredibly complex systems that comprise our anthropogenic earth. It’s also the key to making pragmatic, thoughtful, informed design decisions and proposing alternatives that allow humans and nature to coexist more harmoniously. Design with Nature Design with Nature—rarely has a three-word title so eloquently summed up an entire tome. The most important word in that title is not design, nor DATA Landscape Assessment Landscape Intervention INFORMATION KNOWLEDGE DATA INFORMATION KNOWLEDGE is it nature. It’s with. It sets the stage for design and nature working together in concert to achieve something that is bigger than the sum of the parts, a synergy of design and nature reaching toward the goal of the survival of the human species in particular and the planet in general. It’s not a stretch to say that the development of GIS technology and the entire industry around it was profoundly influenced by the work of McHarg. He popularized the overlay concept and laid the groundwork for what was to become GIS, thus taking a number of budding young landscape architects and geographers and changing their lives forever. McHarg and I may have disagreed on some things, but we clearly shared the vision of using geographic analysis techniques to design a better world. Although we’ve made much progress in building the infrastructure to help us accomplish this monumental task, we’re still not quite there yet. In fact, 28 years after Design with Nature was published, McHarg issued a challenge of sorts to attendees of the 1997 Esri International User Conference in his Keynote Address: “By and large, the ecological planning studies I did in the 1960s and 1970s have not been equaled, far less surpassed. And I think there has got to be a challenge; that is, we’ve got to be able to learn to do at least as well for regions and for the nation and, indeed, for the global environment as we are doing at the moment.” Like McHarg’s Design with Nature, Esri is also celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It’s no coincidence that both the concepts espoused within Design with Nature and the GIS work led by Esri launched almost simultaneously. When McHarg advocated this new methodology of taking geographic considerations into the design process and workflow, I don’t know if he could ever have imagined how far we’d come with GIS by 2009. But the hard work we’ve been doing on developing GIS technology for the last 40 years does not mean we are finished, or even close to being finished. And I feel that all our hard work evolving GIS has led us to this pivotal point. The next logical step in the evolution of this technology is GeoDesign. The Case for GeoDesign GeoDesign borrows concepts from landscape architecture, environmental studies, geography, planning, regenerative studies, and integrative studies. Much like GIS and environmental planning before it, GeoDesign takes an interdisciplinary, synergistic approach to solving critical problems and optimizing location, orientation, and features of projects both local and global in scale. Design is art within the framework of limitations—limitations that arise as a result of function, world view, bias, and other factors, but also limitations that arise as a result of place. Design considering place was at the core of McHarg’s beliefs, and it is the basis for our research and development efforts in the emerging field of GeoDesign. “. . . design is always and necessarily an art as well as a problem-solving activity . . .” —David Pye, The Nature of Design To a certain extent, this is already done today by numerous GIS practitioners in fields like urban and regional planning and environmental management. But GeoDesign makes this easier by making it an integral part of the workflow, both shortening the cycle time of the design process and improving the quality of the results. Cycle time is shortened because GeoDesign moves analysis to an earlier stage in the design process. Rather than analyzing the potential impacts and effects of a proposed project after the design phase, critical factors are instead taken into consideration up front. The quality of the results improves because the project is designed around, in concert with, and/or to fully leverage certain geographic, environmental, and social features while simultaneously minimizing undesirable impacts to those same features. Designing Our Future “GIS: Designing Our Future” is the theme of the 2009 Esri International User Conference. When I talk of designing our future, I believe that combining the wealth of data available about our world with sophisticated analysis and management tools is the prescription for understanding and shaping the future of our planet—an anthropogenic future where advances in human society, technology, etc., are designed in close collaboration with nature, resulting in the best of possible future worlds. It’s a huge task and a delicate balance, for sure, but with help from GIS and GeoDesign tools, we readily accept that challenge. Because, frankly, we have no other choice. What Is GeoDesign? GeoDesign brings geographic analysis into the design process, where initial design sketches are instantly vetted for suitability against a myriad of database layers describing a variety of physical and social factors for the spatial extent of the project. This on-the-fly suitability analysis provides a framework for design, giving land-use planners, engineers, transportation planners, and