The majority of the world's citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached a crisis in thought leadership.
Conventional approaches to engage people in participatory planning exercises are limited in reach and scope. At the same time, sociocultural trends and technology innovation offer opportunities to re-think the status quo in urban planning. The notion of neogeography introduces tools and services that allow non-geographers to use advanced geographical information systems. Similarly, is a neo-planning paradigm without planners possible?
This presentation traces a number of evolving links between urban planning, neogeography and information and communication technology. Two significant trends - participation and visualisation - with direct implications for urban planning are discussed. Combining novel participation and visualisation features, the popular virtual reality environment Second Life is then introduced as a test bed for a series of workshops that engaged high school students in generating narratives with a view to make transparent how they understand and interpret proposed urban designs.
If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk
Map and Directions:
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/contact/
Dr Marcus Foth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He is the team leader of the Urban Informatics research group. He received a BCompSc(Hon) from Furtwangen University, Germany, a BMultimedia from Griffith University, Australia and an MA and PhD in digital media and urban sociology from QUT. Dr Foth was the recipient of an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery funding scheme. He was a 2007 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Employing participatory design and action research, he is working on cross-disciplinary research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, locative media and mobile applications. Dr Foth has published over sixty articles in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings in the last five years. He is the editor of the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (2009). He is the conference chair of OZCHI 2009, a member of the Australian Computer Society and the Executive Committee of the Association of Internet Researchers.
