why did you start urbanology?
Because people need better online tools, so they can join together to actually improve their cities.
Urban development today is driven by private interest and bureaucratic control, and provides almost no facility for real community-driven change.
To fix this, we want to make it easy for people to make physical proposals, and have geographic discussions, about their neighborhoods -- online, where everyone can see.
When everyone gets involved, when they put their hearts and souls into their neighborhoods, the results are extraordinary.
who is this site for?
This site is for people who want to improve their neighborhoods, community economies, and lives.
We believe anyone can make better cities, with the help of this toolkit, when it is fully functional.
It is intended as a leveller. It will create competition for development-as-usual, disrupting it with more genuine civic, democratic control.
As such, it should help community development professionals, those interested in the grassroots, and organizers, to empower people by showing them
some tools. Even in small ways, urbanology will help neighborhoods to control their own destinies.
what is the advantage of using this site, over other approaches?
This is a public site. When you work here, everyone can see it, as you start, or continue, a conversation about some place in your community.
The recording and drawing tools are meant to get the ball rolling,
to broaden collective notes of visions and observations about the places we live.
Everything on the site is geared towards the broadest possible participatory projects. It is customized for gradual growth and improvement.
how is this different than photoshop, sketchup, google earth?
This is intended to be a publicly accessible store of these grassroots geographic conversations about making places better.
You can do designs in photoshop or sketchup, but these are just private ideas, unless
you upload them so they are associated with projects around a particular place,
with the ideas of other people.
A simple sketch of a good idea, or a building with features that are in harmony with the immediate surroundings visible on a streetview photos, will be more interesting to a community than a slick 3d rendering of
something that doesn't really fit the environment or fulfill the needs of people. This is more obvious in a participatory online space than it would be in a web premotion. This is actual engagement, where everyone has an equal voice and a level playing-field.
what kinds of projects or places do you expect people to initiate with this toolkit?
Places that are public, and feel good, that make you happy to be human. These are places like plazas, parks, playgrounds, outdoor cafés, community activity areas and public centers.
Projects are anything, large or small, that the neighborhood needs.
A farmer's market -- a dancehall -- a school -- a bench -- a water-fountain -- a neighborhood entrance -- a streetcar system -- a community tool library -- a public library -- an improved support for an ancient cherry tree -- a re-routed sidewalk around an old tree -- a restoration and re-purpose effort on an old building -- traffic-calming -- better pedestrian or bike areas -- permanent road closure -- removal of parking lots -- an urban garden -- better places for pets, nature, kids, people -- new local businesses or co-ops or incubators that serve the neighborhood.
how will this make better cities?
The cumulative effect of people trying to do good projects, and make good places, is a good city. To do it right, it must be based on real community involvement in the process, so things that are made are the things people want to see. This isn't magic -- people know what they want, when they're given choices. Choice shouldn't just be about consumer goods. People should be able to choose to help start a bakery, or a health clinic, or a rail system.
Also, this particular toolset is based on the sharing of good ideas and examples, in order to broaden people's sense of what 'good' means. We've found that, given this exposure, people end up choosing the same kinds of vibrant, meaningful projects and places,
which are mostly not the kinds of places provided for them today.
This is not 'technology' in the sense that most people think of it. This isn't a general-purpose 'power tool' that does a free-form thing quickly at a high-resolution. We're instead interested in allowing people to put their human qualities into their cities, their life, their feeling ... the existing tools don't even try to do this. They are general-purpose. They do not try to encourage you to do something in harmony with nature, good buildings and people.
how do you know this will work?
This is an experiment: we're trying to find ways to give people tools and a forum currently unavailable, or hard to find, in one place.
But we didn't conjure it from nothing. This emerging toolkit is modeled on the good work of grassroots community developers from around the world over many millenia. We are doing continual experiments to make it work towards the goal of better neighborhoods, towns, and cities. You will see it change a lot. But we will preserve your work.
will it work on phones and tablets?
Absolutely. Our team has a very long history providing pioneering mobile and mapping products, and we want to provide all the advantages we can to people who are out and about, integrating geolocation, photography, GIS databases, etc.
As a result, this will also be a very nice way to find those groovy places, which have a high-level of neighborhood involvement, when you're traveling. That's another way that good ideas and experiences get shared, face-to-face, in real life.
will there be offline functionality?
Yes, we will work to integrate existing offline functionality and provide software to facilitate this for users.
what about 3d?
Although we plan to allow people to use plans, images and models produced with existing tools, we have a very different approach to 3d on our horizon, which we believe will be much more interesting and useful than current tools, and produce more profound results.
what about augmented reality?
For mobile devices, we're planning something that would provide easy access to the community's efforts, so one could provide oneself a guided tour of such places. If other gadgets become useful and popular, we'll explore them, but such technology is beside the point. We want to minimize the technology needed to maximize the injection of human feeling into the built environment. Most of that work is done in person. This site's purpose is only to assist that work, not to attract more attention to technology.
how is this tool collaborative?
Because it is using the same geographic data as everyone else. If someone else has a proposal for a property using urbanology, for example, then you'll see it. Your work will become part of a community conversation.
why don't you have slicker, and more modern, drawing tools?
We really want hand-crafted cities, not factory-made or 'designer' cities. We're not interested in the spline curves of modern industrial design, but instead, the good shape and deep feeling that emerges when people put hard work into making something right. The roughness of the drawing tools was a conscious choice.
any real project involves work and negotiation among a great many stakeholders. how will you facilitate this?
We're developing online tools and processes to help all the people, in their various roles, who are needed to move good, human-scale projects forward. It won't all happen online of course -- it can't -- but we are aiming at an end-to-end facilitation of the process through this toolkit.