The International Geodesign Collaboration: Changing Geography by Design

By Thomas Fisher and Carl Steinitz

The world faces challenges that supersede and ignore national and regional boundaries and cannot be solved by a single individual, nation, science, or profession. Preparing for the outcomes of population growth and rising global temperatures requires multidisciplinary approaches and collaboration amoung all the stakeholders. Global social and environmental issues will increasingly become multiregional and multinational, and we therefore will need to plan in what should become one language. The language of geodesign.

In The International Geodesign Collaboration: Changing Geography by Design, editors Thomas Fisher, Brian Orland, and Carl Steinitz introduce you to a geodesign approach that allows multiple disciplinary teams to collaborate and design at geographic scale using geographic information systems (GIS) and design tools to explore alternative future scenarios. 

• Learn The International Geodesign Collaboration workflow for addressing the complex global challenges when working on widely diverse, multidisciplinary projects.
• Explore the potential futures of 51 university project areas around the world.

The International Geodesign Collaboration: Changing Geography by Design shows how researchers, scientists, designers, and students, can use geodesign principles to work together through analysis, technology, and collaboration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Esri Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781589485730

Book preview

Part I

The International Geodesign Collaboration

First International Geodesign Collaboration meeting, February 2019, at Esri in Redlands, California

First International Geodesign Collaboration meeting, February 2019, at Esri in Redlands, California.

Improving our global infrastructure

Brian Orland, Carl Steinitz, and Thomas Fisher

The world faces a generic but critical challenge: How do we organize and conduct the very beginning and strategic stages of designing for longer term geographical changes in large, multisystem, multiclient, and contentious contexts? This is a severely underrecognized problem when we face crisis, risk, or uncertainty—the most common conditions of our biggest societal challenges. Geodesign (design at geographic scale) represents an emerging design research and practice approach that integrates multiple disciplines and uses digital geographic information systems (GIS)-based analytic and design tools to help explore alternative future scenarios (Goodchild 2010; Steinitz 2012).

On geodesign

Geodesign changes geography intentionally, by design. It tightly couples the creation of proposals for change with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts and by systems thinking (rather than shape thinking), and it is normally supported by digital technology. Organized by a systems-oriented framework (Steinitz 2012), geodesign asks and answers six relevant questions that apply to any geographic circumstance (figure 1): (1) How should the context be described? (2) How does the context operate? (3) Is the current context working well? (4) How might the context be altered? (5) What differences might the changes cause? And (6) How should the context be changed?

Six questions must be asked and answered for any geodesign circumstance (Steinitz 1990, 2012)

Figure 1. Six questions must be asked and answered for any geodesign circumstance (Steinitz 1990, 2012).

A geodesign workflow puts systems thinking into practice. Normally a collaborative enterprise, a geodesign study must be undertaken in a way that all participants—especially the people of the place—can understand. The basis for such shared understanding includes the ability to conceive individual policies and projects and to combine them into comprehensive designs. The process of combination is challenging. A design is a synthesis of decisions in space and time that brings about system-based change. Any individual change, no matter how seemingly localized, affects the system as a whole and can influence what is subsequently feasible and preferable. For example, the decision to align a road in one place or another (or yet another still) will affect the possible later location of housing or commercial developments. Because of, and despite, that complexity, rapid design iterations are critical in geodesign, enabling the quick assessment of potential impacts and costs of design proposals. Here, more challenges emerge. Feedback relationships among individual design propositions require that representation, process, and evaluation models be updated to consider additional design changes. Considering the amount of data and the need for data updates, digital platforms for collaboration and communication usually form the basis of the geodesign workflow.

On negotiation as a geodesign method

Negotiation is the most important method for arriving at political consensus regarding future change, whatever the size and scale of the problem. As a collaborative, negotiated decision-making process, geodesign can address problems that call for a systems thinking approach (Fisher 2016, Steinitz 2014), especially applicable to large, complex, and contentious circumstances related to planning for the future. Fisher (2016) describes geodesign as a geospatial approach to grand challenges … allowing communities of people with common and/or conflicting interests to find each other as well as generate alternative ways of addressing a challenge. It enables different stakeholders to work together with scientists, design professionals, and information technologists in a digitally supported process where the impacts of proposed designs are shown in real time. What makes geodesign interesting and innovative is that the process is geared toward negotiation among diverse interest groups seeking to strike a compromise (figure 2). It attempts to shift the paradigm from a zero-sum game of winners and losers to a win-win situation, in which everyone benefits to some degree.

Geodesign is negotiation among diverse interest groups

Figure 2. Geodesign is negotiation among diverse interest groups.

Developed in many ways and by many contributors, geodesign has been most frequently applied to the initial planning stages of politically contentious problems that inevitably require negotiation to achieve consensus. The two most common circumstances are when the people of a place disagree among themselves about what the problem is and what should happen, and when those who are responsible for providing guidance in the form of a design proposal work in separate silos rather than in direct collaboration, and when they disagree about what should be proposed.

When seen across a range of problem sizes and scales, negotiation is pervasive, but collaborative negotiation in geodesign is especially applicable to midrange problems (figure 3). For problems at the global scale, the geographic sciences provide excellent guidance, and for those at the project scale, the design professions provide excellent service. The mandate for collaboration becomes especially acute at the middle range, where supply-based defensive strategies must be balanced with demand-based offensive strategies, and where the people of the place, who are assumed not to agree with each other, have a major political role. Coming to a politically acceptable planning strategy inevitably requires collaboration among the people of the place, aided by geographic scientists and design professionals, and supported by information technologists. Achieving understanding, communication, collaboration, and negotiation in such situations is not easy.

Central ideas of practice vary with size and scale, although all require negotiation

Figure 3. Central ideas of practice vary with size and scale, although all require negotiation.

The size and scale of a problem also affect how it gets resolved. The geographic scientists at the large size, the geodesign team in the middle range, and the design professionals working at the project scale all have models of practice and central ideas that shape their work. Although those practices overlap, they are also fundamentally different. At the largest scale, the model of practice generally focuses on protecting what we have and taking a mostly defensive attitude toward the future. A commonly cited example is the tripartite Venn diagram from the United Nations Brundtland report (figure 3). It defines sustainability as a balance between environment, society, and economy, and this certainly has been the basis of many difficult international negotiations. At this scale, GIS-based analysis has played a fundamental role in developing the positions that must be discussed and agreed upon. At the project scale, designers must balance many paradigms directed at change. Perhaps the most often cited is the triad of the architect Vitruvius (around 50 BCE)—that a building must have the three qualities: firmitas, utilitas, venustas. It must be durable, useful, and beautiful (figure 3).

The geodesign workflow makes use of diagrams of proposed policies and projects to develop stakeholders’ proposed future plans. The technique of using diagrams and their assessments in standardized colors serves as a shared visual language that enables understanding and communication among diverse stakeholders and enables participants in a workshop to select from the range of diagrams, and to edit or add new diagrams to create a final negotiated proposal for the study area (figure 4).

Geodesign workflow

Figure 4. Geodesign workflow.

The participants in the geodesign process inevitably bring with them varying attitudes when working on midrange problems and evaluating possible solutions (see figure 3). Attitudes vary because of the educational focus and expertise of scientists and designers, and the experiences of the people of the place, which makes them all necessary and valuable collaborators in geodesign. At the earliest stages of the process, when considering a large, complex, and contentious problem in a synchronous collaborative mode of working, it is best served by a generalized form of data expressed as diagrams of policies and projects (Ervin 2012). According to Stephen Ervin (personal communication), diagrams are about information and knowledge, rather than data, and they emphasize topology (organization, location, connection) and conceptual attributes (parallel, concentric, branching, oneness vs twoness, and so on) rather than exact dimension, shape, or other specific measurement. In practice, many diagrams are ‘mapped’ into some (usually 2D or 3D) spatial framework. The products of geodesign at this strategic phase are therefore complex sets of diagrams describing proposals for the future as a combination of schematic policies and projects. The result is not as extensive as typically happens with GIS, nor as detailed as required by Building Information Modeling (BIM), but it is nonetheless extremely useful when confronting a large, complex, and contentious problem. Geodesign provides the tools to enable a collaboratively negotiated consensus based on diagrams of policies and projects, with the outcome indicating only that It will be … or might be … something like this.

The International Geodesign Collaboration

The focus of the International Geodesign Collaboration (IGC) is to understand better how geodesign can be applied to addressing challenges in settings that are widely dispersed and that differ widely in scale and in the extent of resources (skilled people and prepared data) available. The IGC seeks to address a specific and exceptionally complex problem: How do we identify and share the lessons and practices developed by a globally dispersed array of experts so that the resulting knowledge can be leveraged to solve our most pressing societal needs? We know that the solutions will call for deep integration across the traditional expertise residing in the physical, natural, and social sciences, but they will be articulated through the landscape- and city-shaping skills of planners, designers, and engineers. We are interested in how multidisciplinary teams in multi-institutional and multinational groups consider and respond to the environmental, economic, and social impacts of development and change in natural and increasingly engineered systems, while taking into account cultural and governmental differences, as well as the leadership skills of individuals and the challenges of team construction and communication.

The idea for the International Geodesign Collaboration was raised by Carl Steinitz at the Geodesign Summit conferences held at Esri® headquarters in Redlands, California, in 2015 and again in 2016. In January 2018, an agreement was made among Thomas Fisher, Carl Steinitz, Brian Orland, Ryan Perkl, and Mike Gould to organize the collaboration, and by March 2018, through invitation and word-of-mouth, team-leading investigators from about 90 schools had joined the IGC. All had to form multidisciplinary teams to accomplish the agreed-on tasks of the collaboration. Figure 5 indicates the global spread of the participating universities.

Participating university locations

Figure 5. Participating university locations.

Almost every university in the world studies these issues and is potentially able to propose improvements to our normal everyday social and environmental practices. Yet every university and every unit of government acts in its own set of geographies and societies, and with its own content, definitions, methods, languages, color codes, and representation techniques, making it extremely difficult to compare across institutions and countries to learn from each other. This collaboration proposes a radical increase in sharing and in the standardization of communication across those boundaries so that comparisons and mutual learning can take place much more easily. We believe that a central aspect of effective collaboration and eventual action is, and will be, public understanding of complex issues, and that this can be achieved without professional jargon, artistic obscurity, or scientific myopia.

Our goal for this endeavor was bold. We believe that there is need for a large number of people—perhaps 10,000 globally—in the next decade who are educated broadly about the state of the world and specifically about the analytic and synthetic methods to achieve the betterment of society and the environment in the face of inevitable global change. The most efficient way is to educate today’s university students in these matters and to do it in a way that enables collaboration and mutual learning inside the university, and across institutions and nations.

To achieve that goal, we developed an IGC agreement, required of all IGC participant schools:

•join the IGC collaboration via a form at www.igc-geodesign.org,

•join and contribute to at least one of the research groups,

•complete a participant and project profile once a project is determined,

•organize participant team workflow and technological support,

•adapt IGC research on assumptions and innovations to local conditions,

•organize systems data and models for project local conditions,

•apply three scenarios to designs, evaluated at three time stages,

•maintain a record of the geodesign workflow adopted by the team,

•present all the results in the collaboration’s format, in English, in January 2019, ready for exhibition in February, and

•participate in the IGC conference and postconference comparative research.

IGC project objectives

Within our broad goals, we identified several objectives:

•Reveal fundamental aspects of future life on the globe, less influenced by immediate and local political concerns.

•Inform ongoing policy development through geodesign studies made globally at the space and time scales of larger, longer term societal and environmental issues, and then scaled to national and local/regional issues and needs.

•Create an international network based on multidisciplinary university coalitions around geodesign. Publish and exhibit work internationally and make it available in local languages.

•Build a library of shared resources for public education regarding issues of design and planning that matter fundamentally to society and the future shape of the environment.

•Educate future leaders capable of organizing and managing geodesign at global, national, regional, and local scales.

Project structure

Our key observation driving this project was that although the object of attending international meetings is to learn from the experiences of others, our methods of sharing tend to obscure rather than enable that purpose. Designers often use their own idiosyncratic layouts of information, the elements chosen to highlight specific items of local interest, with graphical and cartographic conventions determined by either national standards or personal preference. Project areas can be simple rectangles but are usually complex polygons, sometimes but not always including a context buffer of surrounding landscape influencing and influenced by the project (figure 6). Although designers’ intent may be to solve problems with global consequences, they rarely reveal the assumptions made about the future, nor the design innovations that address the emerging needs. To learn by comparison among projects, it became evident that some organizing principles must be imposed by the IGC so that different projects could express similar ideas in the same ways.

IGC study areas at more than one scale

Figure 6. IGC study areas at more than one scale.

Our starting point was to consider that visual comparison is a first means of evaluating outcomes. Projects were required to identify one or more encompassing square study areas corresponding to a scale of standard sizes (0.5 × 0.5 km, 1 × 1 km . . . 160 × 160 km) (figure 6).

Projects were prescribed to adopt preresearched global change assumptions based on the international governmental and NGO projections (figure 7).

Twelve global assumptions of change, here showing the example of projected water scarcity

Figure 7. Twelve global assumptions of change, here showing the example of projected water scarcity.

Because geodesign is complex and every policy or project has multiple contexts and consequences, we developed 10 systems as the basis for comparison of design impacts, nine of them common to all projects and one left open for a local priority (figure 8).

IGC resource systems

Figure 8. IGC resource systems.

Project teams were asked to select and implement system innovations addressing the nine identified resource systems (figure 9).

Library of 187 innovations corresponding to nine identified IGC resource systems, here showing ecological pest management as an example within the Agriculture system

Figure 9. Library of 187 innovations corresponding to nine identified IGC resource systems, here showing ecological pest management as an example within the Agriculture system.

Projects were required to apply three scenarios, early-, late-, and non-adopters of design changes, and report the impacts at three time stages: 2020 (existing), 2035, and 2050 (figure 10).

IGC design scenarios and timelines

Figure 10. IGC design scenarios and timelines.

Geodesign workflow

IGC projects assume a start date of 2020. Adopting assumptions about global change and regionally expected innovations (see IGC global assumptions and projected systems innovations, www.igc-geodesign.org), each team evaluates its study area, makes a 2035 design, and assesses its impacts (likely in a few iterations), updates the evaluation maps, and then makes a 2050 design and assesses its impacts. The designs for the three scenarios and their three stages are then compared for their impacts. (See IGC Requirements for Projects, www.igc-geodesign.org.)

The IGC does not specify how participant teams should carry out their studies. There are many paths and support options to achieve an IGC workflow using GIS tools such as ArcGIS® software, QGIS, or geodesign tools such as Geodesignhub, GeoPlanner℠ for ArcGIS®, or others. IGC can facilitate some software capabilities that can be applied in diverse settings and workflows; see the Support Technology page of the IGC website, www.igc-geodesign.org, for more information. Choices are determined by individual teams. For detailed descriptions of the elements of the common framework and for poster presentation guidelines, refer to the accompanying web page: Requirements for Projects, www.igc-geodesign.org.

IGC 2019 projects

Global assumptions and projected systems innovations for 2035 and 2050 were prepared by IGC research groups. We identified nine systems that are fundamental to geodesign (see figure 8), and then identified groups for each system and a leader for each group. Each of the system groups researched innovations and strategies that are likely to occur by 2035 and 2050, and that may offer design and planning benefits to all participants. We then developed a display format to illustrate and share ideas, enabling each participant to choose innovations for their project and learn how to design or plan for them. The key elements of an innovation description are a title, a brief description, key website URLs, and properly credited illustrations (see figure 9).

Online at www.igc-geodesign.org, the global assumptions and system innovations describe ideas that may be relevant to some projects but not all. The IGC did not recommend specific outcomes or goals. However, we wrote each assumption and innovation with the knowledge that individual nations and municipalities would scale and parameterize assumptions and innovations to their specific geodesign project. Participants defined their own projects, and with the generosity of Esri® and Geodesignhub, schools were able to acquire software and minimal support for a range of key tools at no cost. Project locations were identified in 37 countries and widely dispersed within them (figure 11).

Project locations

Figure 11. Project locations.

At the most fundamental level, one of the key steps in making comparisons among projects is the ability to compare like with like. Accordingly, to compare IGC outcomes either as traditional wall display posters or as pages in a publication, all participants were required to follow a graphic layout format based on the consistent square-format project locations (see figure 6). Other key elements for presentation included lists of the focal global assumptions for the project and the most important system innovations adopted. As before, all project submissions are available via www.igc-geodesign.org for viewing, machine translation, and download.

IGC 2019 project outcomes

In its first year, 91 schools applied to join the IGC. Fifty-five schools finally submitted completed projects (figure 12), of which 51 appear in this volume, representing the work of 1,100 individuals (see appendix A). Participants from 40 of those schools attended the IGC 2019 meeting to present their work (figure 13). In addition to project presentations, attendees participated in four discussion groups addressing questions generated by the IGC process and exploring the future shape of IGC meetings, including the prospect of a second meeting, in 2020. Two of the discussion topics examined the constraints placed on project participants—the necessity to adhere to a predefined and generic set of resource systems, and the adoption or not of global assumptions and system innovations. A third topic asked a more general question about how the methodological and technical organization of IGC and its processes might have shaped the designs, and, finally, the fourth discussion asked whether the IGC initiative had been useful and should be repeated.

Completed projects: University College London, UK

Figure 12a. Completed project: University College London, UK.

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Mexico

Figure 12b. Completed project: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Mexico.

Poster displays at the IGC opening session in February 2019

Figure 13. Poster displays at the IGC opening session in February 2019.

The IGC 2019 meeting provided opportunities to share experiences among participants at a depth of understanding newly available because of the design process and reporting constraints adopted by project teams. The success of that small advance alone has ensured the continuation of the IGC organization and a second meeting in February 2020. We anticipate many other university teams will join this growing collaboration in geodesign.

Acknowledgments

IGC is largely a volunteer effort. The core steering committee for IGC 2019 comprised Carl Steinitz of Harvard University and University College London, Brian Orland of the University of Georgia, Thomas Fisher of the University of Minnesota, Ryan Perkl of Esri, and Mike Gould of Esri. Valuable technical support came from Esri and Geodesignhub. Maggie Dunlap provided invaluable administrative support. Esri generously hosted the first IGC meeting in Redlands, California, on February 23–25, 2019. The University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota provided additional financial support.

References

Brundtland, Gro Harlem. 1987. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. United Nations.

Ervin, Stephen. 2012. Geodesign Futures—Nearly 50 Predictions. Proceedings of the DLA conference, Bernburg/Dessau, Germany, 22–30.

Fisher, Thomas. 2016. An Education in Geodesign. Landscape and Urban Planning 156 (1): 20–22. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.09.016.

Goodchild, Michael F. 2010. Towards Geodesign: Repurposing Cartography and GIS? Cartographic Perspectives 66: 7-22.

Steinitz, Carl. 1990. A Framework for Theory Applicable to the Education of Landscape Architects (and Other Environmental Design Professionals). Landscape Journal 9 (2): 136–43.

Steinitz, Carl. 2012. A framework for Geodesign. Redlands, CA: Esri Press.

Steinitz, Carl. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf_R4rB7MIQ, (on geodesign dynamics and four recent case studies).

Steinitz, Carl. 2017. https://youtu.be/QERJbL9J1Xw (on geodesign negotiation and four recent case studies).

Vitruvius P. 1960. The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M. H. Morgan. New York: Dover Publications.

Brian Orland, University of Georgia, United States

Carl Steinitz, Harvard University, United States, and University College London, United Kingdom

Thomas Fisher, University of Minnesota, United States

Geodesign systems

Kristina Hill, Richard Kingston, and Alenka Poplin

The IGC required all participants to adopt the same categories of resource systems. Nine systems were standard for all projects, and one was defined as optional or flexible as outlined in figure 1. For the flexible category, suggestions were provided for possible subdivisions of existing categories, or new ones, to suit the needs of an individual project. The organizers of the IGC essentially provided the IGC systems as a hypothesis: Are these types relevant in all projects, and robust enough to be relevant in any future projects?

The IGC system and subsystem categories

Figure 1. The IGC system and subsystem categories.

This top-down approach represents a