Drawing Participation: Histories of Geospatial Computing, Professional Silos, and Computational Potentials for Collaboration in Planning and Design

Abstract

Our tools for geocomputing help us synthesize, record, represent, and imagine the world. But, how can our tools for describing, representing, and designing space help us plan for an uncertain and equitable urban and ecological future? And how can we empower, include, support, and reconcile the visions of a diverse population and complex ecological change in thinking about the future? This is particularly relevant, as in the next forty years, we will build as much urban fabric in the next forty years as we have in the past human history. Yet, for the past forty years, the built environment has been shaped by tools for geocomputing that reflect the vision of a single vendor and the needs of disciplines other than design and planning.

Instead, our Geospatial Computing Systems (GCS), their data models, interfaces, and methods need to start with domain theory and critical understandings of the background of our current tools, rather than the capacities of a specific computational framework. As a model in this direction, in this dissertation I integrate critical research of the different historical, cultural, and technological forces that have shaped our GCS as the starting point of the tool development process.

In the first part of the dissertation, I introduce two episodes in the history of digital GCS: the development of early digital mapping tools at the Laboratory of Computer Graphics (LCG) at Harvard, and the subsequent development of GCS programs at private institutions. I begin by exploring the different ways in which drawing enabled GCS to become computational. I present the early encounters between drawing and computers at the LCG to argue that digital computing was implemented in GCS methods to broaden the use of mapping and facilitate collaboration in the planning and design disciplines. I show how, at the same time, such early computer mapping programs inspired and enabled the development of rational planning and design methods.

Second, I present the history and work of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) during the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of time and an institution that developed modern GCS software paradigms. Through a computational lens, I show how these interfaces and representations have permanently affected the ways in which GCS have been incorporated in planning and design, and has resulted in a lack of a collaborative, robust, visual and graphic-based GCS framework for the design and planning practice.

In the second part of this dissertation, I reflect on the limitations and potentials that have been historically built into current GCS tools, and I introduce a series of guidelines to improve GCS frameworks for participatory planning and inclusive design. I describe 1) the conceptual and technical background of two new tools; 2) the technical implementations of the tools; 3) and a set of case studies to test the value of both tools in planning and design education and practice. The first tool that I present in this dissertation, Painting with Data (PWD) is an open-source, collaborative, web-based software with a visually-based interface and data structure, which allows users to create spatial models by directly manipulating the graphic representation. The second tool, Drawing Participation (DP) is the first real-time, peer-to-peer, collaborative GCS tool that integrates drawing, mapping and spatial analysis functionality to bridge the capacities of two types of software paradigms, GCS and CAD. Altogether, the frameworks point towards the potential of GCS tools for integrating analytic, participatory, and design methods, while bringing ideas of inclusion, equity, and justice into the urban design and planning process.