



“From a sustainability point of view, there’s great potential in geodesign to move design in a new direction,” explains Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design and the summit’s keynote speaker. (He’s also a contributing editor to architect.) “It asks, ‘How can we use our buildings more effectively?’ and answers the question, ‘Do you need to build at all?’ As designers, we are often intuitive, but our decisions are not based on data. We don’t know the consequences. Geodesign allows architects to make decisions based on [impacts] such as water [use] and carbon output.” In his talk, Fisher said that geodesign could potentially forestall the kinds of housing development patterns that led to the recent economic crisis, and could help track food production and foresee possible shortages. The claims may sound omniscient, but they are rooted in real-life data.

To understand geodesign, it is important first to be clear on GIS. Urban planners, conservationists, sociologists, and others have long used it to manage and visualize data­base information across a region or an urban area. The U.S. Forest Service can use a GIS map to manage information about endangered species (points may represent Southern Spotted Owls), or a city manager may use GIS to layer types of crime and crime rates over land-value maps. Importantly, GIS maps can change over time, so it’s possible to track how an event can impact surrounding conditions. And increasingly, the data under­pinning GIS visualizations can be downloaded by the public for free or at very low cost.

Given the right data sets, GIS can go beyond locative analysis and reveal social and cultural information. In 2005, the Spatial Information Design Lab, a research group at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, mapped the city-prison-city-prison migration loop in five U.S. cities, with striking implications. The lab’s co-directors, Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams, identified individual “million-dollar” blocks whose residents had been incarcerated at a public cost of $1 million or more. “Architects tend to just use GIS for base maps or land-use diagrams,” says Williams, who teaches data visualization to Columbia’s architecture and planning students. “But that is just one slice. It offers a dynamic way of representing unseen patterns and contextual relationships across a regional area.”

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