4th Esri Geodesign Summit (review)

In the relatively short span of five or six years, geode-sign has gone from a neologism used by GIS-savvy landscape planners to an interdisciplinary activity that is supported by workshops, conferences, and university degrees. As the Esri Geodesign Summits have done in the past, the most recent meeting served as an opportunity to evaluate the current state of the practice and speculate on possible futures for this quickly developing area of design activity. Shannon McElvany, Esri Global Community Development Industry Manager, orchestrated the event, which attracted 300 attendees from 19 countries and 20 industries. Like the 2013 meeting, a slim majority had attended a previous summit. The size and mix provided a basis for both the continuation of conversations started in years past and the meaningful inclusion of new perspectives.

The Platinum Sponsor was Eagleview Technologies; the Gold Sponsors were The Planning Center | DC&E (now known as Placeworks), Skycatch, Inc., and SmarterBetterCities AG; and the Silver Sponsor was Placeways LLC.

There were three types of presentations. First, there were ten 30-minute feature talks (mostly by practitioners) from a variety of fields including landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, risk assessment, public and private development, park conservation, and biomimicry. Second, there were nineteen 10-minute “lightning talks” (mostly by scholars) that summarized built work, research investigations, and educational initiatives. Finally, there were technical workshops that demonstrated the most recent software advances by Esri. Both days had ample break time to reconnect with established colleagues and meet new ones. Tom Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, served as emcee, graciously leading conversations among speakers and with the audience in a way that was much richer than typical Q&A sessions.

There were also a variety of preconference events. There were four instructional workshops on geodesign software: “Redlands Redevelopment—CityEngine Training;” “Practicing Geodesign Using ArcGIS;” “Story Maps: Using ArcGIS as a Communications Medium;” and “Hands-on Introduction to CommunityViz Software for Geodesign.” Kelleann Foster, one of the lead faculty members for Penn State’s Geodesign Programs, co-led a meeting of 17 educators with Shannon McElvany. Finally, there was a lecture by Carl Steinitz on two of his recent geodesign workshops. His 2012 book, A Framework for Geodesign: Changing Geography by Design, served as a touchstone for many of the presentations and discussions.

Given that geodesign is relatively new, and that it draws upon many sources of knowledge, it is no surprise that there is no agreed upon sense of what constitutes its philosophical principles as a discipline or its methodological extents as a practice. Nevertheless, informed and informing opinions are offered at each summit. This year, a concise definition that resonated across the talks came from Tess Canfield and Carl Steinitz (building on one given by Michael Flaxman at the first Geodesign Summit and later amended by Stephen Ervin): “Geodesign applies systems thinking to the creation of proposals for change and impact simulations in their geographic contexts, usually supported by digital technology.” Given the origins of geodesign and the venue of the meeting, the last phrase “usually supported by digital technology” warrants the scrutinizing question of “supported in what way?”

Keynote speaker Kongjian Yu, Dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking U niversity and founder of the firm Turenscape, offered the opinion that the problems of shaping and maintaining our environment are too difficult for us to address without computational aids. For him, geode-sign technologies and techniques allow people to make up for cognitive limitations. They allow us to use science for “the art of survival.” Several of the lightning talks illustrated such complexity. For example, Bart Johnson and colleagues at the University of Oregon examined possible interactions among very large numbers of independent property owners, distinctive land management practices, and climate change uncertainty to understand fire risk. Ryan Perkl of the University of Arizona and his students combined network theory and ecosystem performance criteria to help the Arizona Department of Game and Fish to identify and design wildlife corridors at...