Architects and GIS

This week, I arranged for the GIS (Geographic Information Systems) expert at the school to give an introductory workshop to the Center for Public Space Research. GIS is a powerful and complicated tool that enables you to visually display incredible amounts of data as maps and diagrams. For example, a spreadsheet describing crime from the local police department (including crime type, location and date) could be opened and displayed on a map of the city using GIS. Then, one could add data about residents' income and tell the program to display crimes geographically based on average incomes of neighborhood residents. In other words, different types of information can be added together and sorted or arranged in a variety of ways.

Planners have been quick to adopt GIS, perhaps because they are—traditionally—more concerned about demographics and policy than architects. But, it seems to me that architects and urban designers could use GIS in order to identify sites for new proposals or interventions. One example of this approach is illustrated by Dr. Anne Vernez Moudon from the University of Washington. Her team established a complex series of criteria for describing walkable neighborhoods in Seattle and then queried the GIS system for sites in Seattle's suburbs that also matched the same criteria. After site visits revealed significant barriers to walking and cycling in these environments, Vernez Moudon could potentially recommend design proposals or recommendations for these environments.

Here at the Center, GIS offers a fantastic strategy for organizing the people-centered data collected in Copenhagen and other cities. Entering this data into the GIS system would provide very efficient methods for displaying, archiving and interpreting this data.

So, at this point I am searching for a way to test out some of these ideas by integrating this tool into my own research.