New Digital Tool Helps Update Urban Planning Process
Researchers with UMaine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), a program of the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, have built a dynamic digital platform that will give cities a more effective tool for forecasting and planning.
Covering over 80 municipalities in the Portland and Bangor regions, the Urban Sim-based model, developed by researchers at University of Southern Maine (USM) in collaboration with colleagues at UMaine, provides an intersection of data sets that includes information on transportation, regional planning, zoning and land use as well as property tax records.
The development of Urban Sim was the culmination of SSI’s five-year Sustainable Urban Regions Project (SURP) project. The SURP team’s objective was to develop data sets and computer modeling capabilities that would allow stakeholders such as city officials and transportation planners to examine interrelationships within the socioeconomic and technological forces that shape urban areas.
The team, led by Charles Colgan, Professor of Public Policy and Management in the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at USM, worked in a direction that was the reverse of many other sustainability science endeavors. While stakeholder collaborative efforts often involve taking science off university campuses and into communities, Colgan’s team got a chance to bring their longtime community work into the lab.
“We are planners. All our work involves interaction with communities. The SSI project allowed us to do something different. We took our community-based experience and we were able to delve into deeper science,” Colgan said.
The deeper science involved a collaboration of planning experts, economists and ecologists. The team worked closely with city and transportation planners in addition to a variety of community groups.
“We worked with a broad cross section of people in southern Maine and the Bangor region,” Colgan said.
Colgan’s team is publishing several papers on the project and is seeking funding to continue to develop Urban Sim as a mode to examine sustainability issues arising from an aging population in the state.
The SURP team includes: Colgan; Jack Kartez, Professor, Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at USM; Yuseung Kim, Assistant Professor, Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at USM; Kathleen Bell, Associate Professor, UMaine’s School of Economics; Rob Lilieholm, Associate Professor, UMaine’s School of Forest Resources.