Coined as the title of a 1993 essay by German spatial planning professor Klaus Kunzmann, geodesign now is the subject of international conferences with increasing attendances, two new white papers, a forthcoming textbook and various proposed university courses to help freshly educate 21st century planning professionals.

Basic principles of geodesign originated with observations of natural environmental systems by ancient villagers on all continents – and grew sporadically to inform various 20th century approaches to ‘organic architecture’, ‘Gaia theory’, and ‘sustainability’.

Promoted for the past three years by California-based leaders of Esri, a global corporation selling geographic information science (GIS) software products, geodesign is a vision to advance modelling, photo-imaging and other geo-tagged information mapping technologies which can support multi-disciplinary groups to ‘design in geographic space’.

In a geodesign white paper draft-released in January 2012, Esri’s founder and president, Jack Dangermond, wrote: ‘You and I are living in a world where we’re going to have to move away from simply conserving places, towards proactively creating healthy places. … Geodesign represents the dawn of a new era in man’s relationship with the environment – the age of designing a better future.’

Jack Dangermond (Robot sketch programmed by Patrick Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie/Goldsmiths for d_city)

British landscape scholar Carl Steinitz, Dangermond’s former professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in Boston, is writing the world’s first textbook on geodesign for release in English and Chinese later this year. Included will be his widely applauded 1995 diagram called ‘A Framework for Landscape Planning’ – advocating a choice of six types of models for landscape planning. During the mid-1990s, Steinitz and most of his peers were mainly working on paper but his six types of models now are being envisaged by younger followers as ‘digital online models of the geoscape’.

Steinitz assigned a question to be answered by each type of model:

• Representation models (how should the context be described?)

• Process models (how does the context operate?)

• Evaluation models (Is the current context working well?)

• Change models (how might the context be altered?)

• Impact models (what differences might the alterations cause?)

• Decision models (should the context be changed?)

Steinitz and Dangermond recently led a workshop with the City of Redlands (California) to assess performances of six multi-disciplinary teams applying each of these models to environmental management and development issues for the central Redlands land zone.

Carl Steinitz (Botplot generated by Patrick Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie/Goldsmiths College for d_city)

Writers of other geodesign white papers are Bill Miller and Shannon McElvaney, both members of Esri’s geodesign services team. Esri also has a substantial publishing division and specialist library informing geographic information science/systems (GIS) professionals.

Before Google Earth, the GIS industries tended to enable urban planners via 2D (flat maps) and 2.5D (relief maps) linked to databases of information usually filed as spreadsheets. Now the technologies are being progressed towards a concept described by British science writer Richard Dawkins as ‘evolutionary jelly’.

Download: ISDE Vision 2020 Long Paper 2011

Massimo (Max) Craglia

Originally named in 1992 by former United States Vice President Al Gore – and commercially launched as Google Earth in 2005 – the Digital Earth movement (known also by other names) is expanding its support base and gaining momentum across a wide range of science and technology-literate organisations, major sectors and professional disciplines.

The movement is being described as a ‘global public-private partnership’ and a ‘global technology network’ to organise a ‘system of systems’ to accelerate climate change solutions. A key co-ordinating agency is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is being advised by a Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technology Advice (SBSTA) and (decreasingly) an Expert Group on Technology Transfer. It has announced plans to set up in Europe a Climate Technology Centre to manage the network.

ISDE vision 2020 long paper 2011

UN-HABITAT Executive Director Dr Joan Clos

After several years of preparations by an international steering committee managed by a small team in the UN-HABITAT headquarters in Nairobi, the campaign officially was launched by Dr Clos’ predecessor, Dr Anna Tibaijuka, during the 2010 World Urban Forum in Rio de Janiero. Dr Tibaijuka finished her term shortly after that assembly of more than 14,000 international delegates.

During Dr Clos’ 2011 administrative restructuring of the UN agency ‘for better urban futures’, he has set up a new Communications, Advocacy and Outreach division within his office. Now led by Spanish communications specialist Ana Moreno, it will manage future evolution of both the World Urban Campaign and a new public marketing project branded ‘I’m a City Changer’.

The World Urban Campaign steering committee – of representatives from a range of urban development and city government organisations – is led by former long-standing UN-HABITAT official Nicholas You (Chair) and United States urban planning academic Dr Eugenie Birch (Deputy Chair). With the earlier UN-HABITAT secretariat led by Nicholas You before his retirement, they have established contractual partnerships with a range of large and small commercial, government and non-government organisations.

Partners of the World Urban Campaign have agreed to support the agreed goal ‘Better City, Better Life’ via six ‘Paris Principles’ to help support sustainable urban development:
—A Green City
—A Planned City
—An Inclusive City
—A Productive City
—A Safe and Healthy City
—A Resilient City

At the campaign steering committee’s latest meeting in Amsterdam, Dr Clos told partners ‘we are placing a lot of effort and impetus for the success of the World Urban Campaign. I want to project three key messages.

‘One. The city is an asset not a liability. We need a new approach to cities in the media. We have seen a pessimistic approach focused on the problems of the city. This is not good– it doesn’t help to mobilise positive energies.

‘Two. Cities should be well planned and designed. Intelligent urban planning is extremely important. If we don’t design the future of a city then we end up with a mass of initiatives without order. This has been the case since the first cities were built in the Mesapotamian era 5000 years ago.

‘Three. Cities are communities. They are efforts and results by collectives of humans. This is why the public sector should work with the private sector on urban development goals.’

As well as the six Paris Principles and Dr Clos’ three concepts for understanding cities, UN-HABITAT has developed seven new priorities for improving key challenges shared by many cities, especially in developing countries. These are:
—better urban planning and design
—better urban legislation and governance
—better urban economies and job creation systems
—better basic services (especially water and sanitation)
—better transport and energy provision
—better housing (especially relevant to slum settlements)
—reduction of risks to citizens
—better urban research and capacity development

Planetary Systems Modelling PSM | Geneva is the base proposed for a future International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES) that is intended to attract around €1 billion in private sector funding to model the planet’s climate and environmental systems.

Supported by the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and the World Meteorological Organization’s World Climate Research Programme, the not-for-profit ICES Foundation is being led by Australian ICT entrepreneur Bob Bishop, a former CEO of Silicon Graphics (SGI).

Bob Bishop

During its heyday in the 1980s, SGI was the incubator for inventors of the Keyhole program that eventually launched commercially as Google Earth in 2005. Today, Bishop suggests, Google Earth is a ‘popular’ starting point for a huge new movement to use networked computers to record, simulate and predict behaviours and circumstances around the planet.

‘Google Earth is a beautiful flythrough of a static database but we want to put cause and effect dynamics on top of that database – so we could see the weather, the climate, the environment, biodiversity and even the interactions of the Earth with the Sun through space weather,’ says Bishop (in an interview recorded at IBM’s Research Lab in Zurich).

Launched in 2010 with another video interview recorded at CERN, the European research organisation using particle and nuclear physics to understand how the Universe works, the ICES project now is being promoted as ‘a CERN for understanding how the Earth works’.

Says Bishop: ‘This is a long term, very ambitious mission to bring together all the sciences, which are currently in separate silos and don’t talk to each other enough. Until we integrate these sciences horizontally, we really don’t know the best way to simulate the future of the planet.’

To begin the project, Bishop plans to spend three years working with a core team of two scientists and three systems engineers to build digital tools for transdisciplinary model development and create (as a proof of concept) a real time, high-resolution Digital Earth model. Also he is developing a global network of partner organisations, a governance and legal framework and funding.

The proposed Earth model would include:

—convention, cloud and aerosol (air pollution) physics
—dynamic vegetation and deep ocean physics
—improved grid resolution and fidelity
—improved error management and model uncertainties
—improved parametricisation methods and insights
—massive data streams assimilated from new space and in-situ sensor networks
—integrated NWP and climate modelling methods
—combinations of seasonal, inter-seasonal, annual, inter-annual and decadal data, skills and capabilities
—links between space weather, solar sciences, climate and environmental modelling

While today’s top 10 computer systems are all over a petaflop in power, Bishop believes the Earth simulation project will need at least 1000 times more power during the next 10 years. ‘We believe it will take an exoflop to solve the problem of integrating all the sciences and increasing our accuracies of prediction,’ he says.

Like other leaders of the Digital Earth movement, Bishop is excited by the potentials of the ‘very powerful’ citizen science movement to contribute environmental information to the global model.

‘The idea of having seven billion smartphones available for computation is pretty good. It requires a lot of software to bring it all together but I’m thinking on the data which can be provided by those phones. For instance over the next 10 years it’s possible for these phones to have a single chip automatic weather station – and that, combined with GPS data, would be very handy for a global simulator trying to predict the weather in future. So I look upon citizen science as a very valuable data entry point.

‘But these smartphones also can translate output from the global model. Even in developing countries, cellphones are penetrating very quickly. Governments in those countries could benefit from having output from the global simulator, which would tell them somewhat what’s going to happen to their local weather – and that could be helpful for running their own economies.’

Virtual Nations and Networks VNN and City Information Modelling CIM | Arguably the world’s first ‘Virtual Nation’ project was unveiled in more detail during US President Barack Obama’s visit to Canberra last week (16 November).

At a conference discussing new applications by governments of spatial information and imaging (Google Earth-style) technologies, several speakers discussed how to prototype a world’s best practice ‘Virtual Australia and New Zealand’ platform to support a wide range of computer simulations of complex, dynamic, operational and environmental systems.

The intention is to integrate with, expand and accelerate existing international achievements and agreements towards one ‘Global Spatial Data Infrastructure’ system to underpin both the ‘Digital Earth’ and ‘Global Earth Observation System of Systems’ (GEOSS) visions.

These now seem central to the forthcoming ‘global technology network to accelerate climate change solutions’ that is gradually being developed by the Bonn-based United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC).

Auckland-based architect and scientist Richard Simpson, chair of the digital cities working party of the International Society for Digital Earth (headquartered at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing), indicated that his members would be concerned with accelerating smart infrastructure, developing new tools and systems to help save water and energy, minimise costs and carbon pollution, and engage communities to help make well-informed planning decisions.

To help kickstart a new global project ‘towards online urban planning of eco-cities’, he showed several new ’3D post-CAD visualisation’ applications intended to be viewed on mobile tablet devices to help planners and property owners understand in much greater detail the conditions of their environments; especially to develop smarter methods of water management. They are:

—3D Catchment View (amalgamating LIDAR, hyperspectral, GIS and sensor data to understand flows of water across a catchment zone or suburb),

—3D Property View (providing more detailed information to property owners and official inspectors, including information on underground geology),

—3D Operations View (focusing on above and underground pipe and cable systems)

—3D Underground View (exploiting radar mapping and augemented reality technologies to visualise locations of underground services, tree roots, rocks, etc)

Melbourne logistics and manufacturing management expert Michael Haines clarified more detailed concepts for advancing the Virtual ANZ Infrastructure project – focusing on how to create an alliance of all regulated (official) owners of data to construct a highly secure platform that could allow different levels of authorised access to regulated datasets. He said the platform should be owned jointly by the data owners, with the data maintained separately by each owner.

Haines proposed a new project to work with local government authorities to develop a ‘Virtual Homes and Workspaces’ program that eventually would allow property owners and users to contribute images, plans and other information about their land and buildings to council-held databases that would be accessible via the national system. If applied especially to regional communities (a Government priority in Australia), this proposal would provide a strong rationale for relevancy of Australia’s currently controversial National Broadband Network (NBN).

Another controversy is how the Australian Government can establish an effective governance system to manage competitive government, research, commercial and community groups and leaders. Several special interest factions already have been jostling to gain control of the Virtual Australia-Data Cities project or specific aspects of it.

For example two substantial research organisations – NICTA and the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC-SI) – have gained research sector control of Haines’ new VANZI company despite his stated intent that it should represent official data owners (government authorities, utilities).

These research organisations and others have been refusing to support a 2008 NICTA-funded proposal to set up a Data Cities Research Alliance (DCRA) representing all Australian and NZ research organisations and to help bring the built environment professions towards the Virtual ANZ/Digital Earth vision via integrating natural systems modelling with models of buildings and cities.

Meanwhile a key cluster of companies, universities and government agencies – the Australian Spatial Consortium (set up to support two funding bids by the CRC-SI) is being disbanded and CRC-SI CEO Professor Peter Woodgate has lost support from the University of Melbourne’s geospatial unit, notably its new Director, Professor Abbas Rajabifard, a key global leader of the spatial data Infrastructure and management movement.

Sydney electrical and telecoms research engineer Peter Hitchiner, proposed leader of the Data Cities Research Alliance, is being backed by a Reference Panel of about a dozen national industry groups but this consortium recently lost its chairman, Warwick Watkins, a former government leader of the spatial and land information sector, following a New South Wales government corruption inquiry.

Arrangements for involving research organisations in the Virtual Australia project are likely to be proposed by the ANZ Land Information Council (ANZLIC, representing senior Commonwealth and State Government land information bureaucrats) and the Commonwealth Government’s Office of Space Policy in the Department of Resources Energy and Tourism. Leading all three organisations is Canberra surveyor Drew Clarke who was hailed at the conference as ‘a worthy champion’ following lack of progress by his predecessor. Clarke also represents the Government on the CRC Spatial Information.

Founded by Professor Yoshihiro Kobayashi of Arizona State University, the World16 group uses the UC-win/Road (up and coming Windows-based road simulation system) software developed by FORUM8 AZ, a Japan-headquartered architecture, engineering and construction solutions consortium.

Academics annointed by Forum8AZ to attend the twice-annual World16 research presentations include Professors Kobayashi, Kostas Terzidis (Harvard), Marcos Novak (University of California Santa Barbara), Taro Narahara (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Thomas Tucker (Winston-Salem State University) Matthew Swarts (Georgia Institute of Technology), Ruth Ron (University of Florida), Ron Hawker (Zayed University), Wael Abdelhameed (University of Bahrain), Tomohiro Fukuda (Osaka University), Paolo Fiamma (University of Pisa), Marc-Aurel Schnabel and Inge Qu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Michael Jemtrud and Nik Luka (McGill University).

The FORUM8 research group is partly inspired by other corporate-sector initiatives aimed to promote particular simulation and modelling software packages to research and professional leaders. Other initiatives include the Autodesk University (large annual conferences of Autodesk product users) and the Smart Geometry  conferences and workshops established by a small group of London-based academic, industry and architectural leaders using Bentley Systems’ Generative Components creative wire model sculpturing modules. (The Bentley staff inventor of GC, Robert Aish, is now with Autodesk).

Gehry and Shelden already have been widely applauded for applying to complex building designs advanced computer programs which accurately simulate for automated manufacturing processes the structures of aeroplanes and spaceships.

Now they are placing Gehry’s two main companies in an ‘honest broker’ role between arch-rivals Dassault Systèmes (France) and Autodesk (United States), which have been competing to lead technology efficiency reforms in the notoriously resources-wasteful international construction industry. Construction-oriented markets are estimated to be worth more than $US5 trillion annually.

Since the early 1990s, when Gehry was designing Disney Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (the first of his civic landmarks featuring complex arrangements of multi-curved sheets of titanium), Shelden has been leading a team of computer modelling experts developing the world’s most sophisticated building information modelling (BIM — also known as CAD/CAM) system.

Closeup of Digital Project structural model for the One Island East project, showing structural clashes yet to be resolved. Courtesy Gehry Technologies.

They began by adapting Dassault’s CATIA and other advanced structural simulation softwares to gradually create their own architectural modelling system named Digital Project. DP now is used in the offices of some of the world’s most sculpturally ambitious architects and is promoted to Gehry Partners’ architecture clients by Gehry Technologies in the software-as-a-service format. GT’s major independent project, the One Island East office tower in Hong Kong, developed by Swire, has won green building awards internationally.

Members of Gehry’s new strategic alliance include Massimo Colomban, founder of Permasteelisa; architects Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Greg Lynn, David Childs, Wolf Prix, David Rockwell, Moshe Safdie, and Ben van Berkel, landscape architect Laurie Olins, visual communications strategist Richard Saul Wurman and solar engineer Matthius Schuler. Some of this group are existing members of the Gehry Advisory Board.

Further information on the Gehry Technologies site at http://www.gehrytechnologies.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=168&Itemid=185

Announcement of the Gehry efficient buildings alliance can be seen as a key contribution to the new GeoDesign movement which has been promoted for several years by Jack Dangermond and his geographic information science corporation, Esri (United States). GeoDesign’s supporters are more focused on how to apply spatial information sciences technologies to the challenges of urban planning – but including buildings. Esri plans its third GeoDesign conference at its Redlands CA campus in early January 2012. It recently acquired Procedural, a spin-off company from ETH-Zurich’s building modelling researchers who developed a software system named CityEngine.

Shelden recently agreed to host an initial meeting of technology experts in both building and city modelling to discuss a potential Virtual North America simulation project which has been conceived as a potential collaboration between US and Canadian government agencies and private sector partners. Other continent-wide simulation projects are in early stages of development in Europe, Australia-New Zealand and China.

At the project’s second stakeholders’ workshop, held in Canberra on 15 April 2011, about 25 representatives from relevant public and private sector groups agreed to help launch the Virtual Australia concept at selected technology conferences and trade fairs this year.

Hosted by the Geoscience Australia Office of Spatial Data Management, the meeting was co-chaired by technologies industry leaders Michael Haines and Richard Simpson.

Attendees agreed there are numerous existing public sector ventures of relevance to a Virtual Australia ‘Sim Continent’ – especially the AUScope, TERN and AURIN environmental modelling support projects that have been generously funded from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Several existing and potential Co-operative Research Centres appear logical partners – along with up to seven national research institutions and the Universities Australia consortium.

As well as research, government and community groups, more than 15 peak industry organisations have expressed support.

More co-ordination and communication is required to ‘connect up’ the diverse operations and organisations.

Said Michael Haines: ‘VA is Australia’s part of a ‘true-to-life computer model of the physical world’ … a fully interoperable interactive 3D simulation of the natural and built environment (including internal spaces and below ground) … on all relevant scales, over all relevant time periods, plus all related information. It will also be subject to the same authentication, security access controls and privacy rights as are applicable in the physical world.

‘Like the real world, it will be built progressively over time … but much more quickly!’

The Virtual Australia project also has potential to join with similar environmental modelling projects now being set up in New Zealand – potentially creating a Virtual ANZ project that could launch in relation to the 2015 Centenary of the ANZAC joint military alliance set up during the First World War.

Virtual ANZ would contribute its databanks and visuals to the emerging Digital Earth | Nations | Cities global technology network. Inspired by the ‘Technology Mechanism’ promised in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the network’s initial partners are the International Society for Digital Earth, the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association, the United Nations Habitat World Urban Campaign, the Metropolis World Association of Major Cities and the international Smart Light low-energy light art celebrations.

More than 75 other global special interest organisations are relevant to the growth of what appears to be the 21st century’s most substantial political and economic movement: variously titled Digital Earth, Smart Earth, Smarter Planet and Living Earth Simulators.

The Virtual Australia project is being informally supported by some federal Government Ministers because it has potential to become a popular rationale for substantial spending on the proposed National Broadband Network.

VA’s proponents say they are keen to involve state and local governments to organise various Virtual Cities and Towns projects, where local children and adults could supply to the national databank GPS-tagged images and information about different conditions in their localities. Among geospatial technologies experts, this idea is known as volunteered geographic information (VGI).

Planetary Systems Modelling PSM | The International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) is writing a new Vision 2020 statement to be released at its 7th Symposium in Perth 23-25 August 2011.

An international working group, chaired by geospatial scientists Professor Mike Goodchild (US) and GUO Huadong (China), recently met in Beijing to discuss how to interpret and incorporate emerging technologies for online monitoring of the planet’s complex environmental systems and human interactions.

Set up in the early 2000s, following a speech promoted via United States Presidential candidate Al Gore in 1998, the ISDE is the global peak organisation of space scientists and agencies. Working with other international specialist groups, it aims to help governments collaboratively manage and accelerate the ‘SimPlanet’ project that was first commercialised by Google Earth in 2005.

The ISDE is one of four main partners in the Digital Earth | Nations | Cities technology network now emerging in response to the 2009 Copenhagen Accord’s clause 11 proposal for a Technology Mechanism to accelerate climate change solutions. Other partners include the Metropolis World Association of Major Metropolises, the UN-HABITAT World Urban Campaign and the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association.

Involving research experts in remote sensing, satellite monitoring, geospatial mapping and intelligent imaging systems, the ISDE now aims to broaden its professional membership and public support.

Professor Mike Goodchild

Mike Goodchild said: ‘Our charge is to build forward to 2020, anticipating the technologies that will be available then, the needs people will have and the data that will have been collected.’

Members of the working group are Drs Alessandro Annoni, Massimo Craglia and Martino Pesaresi of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispria, Italy; Dr John van Genderen and Professor Kees de Bie of the University of Twente’s ITC research centre in Enschede, Netherlands; Professor WANG Changlin of CEODE, Beijing; Richard Simpson of the Nextspace innovation group, Auckland, New Zealand; Dr Peter Woodgate of the Spatial Information research centre, Melbourne, Davina Jackson from the UN-HABITAT World Urban Campaign steering committee, Sydney, Professor BIAN Ling of the University of Buffalo, Colorado; Dr Remetey-Fültipp Gábor from the Hungary Association for Geoinformation and Professor Manfred Ehlers of the Universitaet Osnabrueck, Germany.

China's new Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth in Beijing.

Planetary Systems Modelling PSM | China’s leading space agency for satellite monitoring has launched the world’s first custom-built, 21st century Digital Earth research complex.

Known as the Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth (CEODE), the L-shaped complex (complemented by a circular auditorium) was opened on 16 March 2011 in a ceremony attended by geospatial research leaders from Europe, North America and Australia, and a multi-cultural group of postgraduate students.

Headed by Professor GUO Huadong, CEODE has been hosting the International Society for Digital Earth since it was founded in the early 2000s. Now it also will host the International Programme Office for Integrated Research on Disaster Risk project (led by Professor Jane Rovins), and the International Centre on Space Technologies for Cultural and Natural Heritage (under the auspices of UNESCO).