Community participation and geographic information systems chapter 1

Kheir Al-Kodmany is Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.. At the time of this research, Michaelwas also Associate Profes

Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems

Community Participation and Geographic

Information Systems

Edited by

William J Craig,

Trevor M Harris

and Daniel Weiner

London and New York

First published 2002 by Taylor & Francis

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Taylor & Francis Inc,

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Taylor & Francis is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2002 Taylor & Francis

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Every effort has been made to ensure that the advice and information in

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Community participation and geographic information systems/[edited by] William J Craig, Trevor M Harris and Daniel Weiner.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p ).

1 Geographic information systems–Social aspects 2 Geographic information systems–Citizen participation I Craig, William J II Harris, Trevor M III Weiner, Daniel.

G70.212.C65 2002

ISBN 0415–23752–1

DANIEL WEINER, TREVOR M HARRIS AND WILLIAM J CRAIG

2 Surveying the extent of PPGIS practice in the United

DAVID S SAWICKI AND DAVID RANDALL PETERMAN

3 Models for making GIS available to community

organizations: dimensions of difference and appropriateness 37

HELGA LEITNER, ROBERT B McMASTER, SARAH ELWOOD,

SUSANNA McMASTER AND ERIC SHEPPARD

PART II

Inner City

4 A voice that could not be ignored: community GIS

and gentrification battles in San Francisco 55

CHERYL PARKER AND AMELITA PASCUAL

5 Mapping Philadelphia’s neighbourhoods 65

LIZA CASEY AND TOM PEDERSON

6 The impacts of GIS use for neighbourhood revitalization

SARAH ELWOOD

7 The Atlanta Project: reflections on PPGIS practice 89

DAVID S SAWICKI AND PATRICK BURKE

Planning

8 Web-based PPGIS in the United Kingdom 101

RICHARD KINGSTON

9 GIS-enhanced land-use planning 113

STEPHEN J VENTURA, BERNARD J NIEMANN, JR.,

TODD L SUTPHIN AND RICHARD E CHENOWETH

10 Portland Metro’s dream for public involvement 125

MARK BOSWORTH, JOHN DONOVAN AND PAUL COUEY

11 A community-based and collaborative GIS joint

venture in rural Australia 137

DANIEL H WALKER, ANNE M LEITCH, RAYMOND DE LAI,

ALISON COTTRELL, ANDREW K L JOHNSON AND

13 There must be a catch: participatory GIS in a

Newfoundland fishing community 173

PAUL MACNAB

14 Environmental NGOs and community access to technology

as a force for change 192

DAVID L TULLOCH

vi Contents

15 Mexican and Canadian case studies of community-based

spatial information management for biodiversity

THOMAS C MEREDITH, GREGORY G YETMAN AND GISELA FRIAS

Development

16 Promoting local community participation in forest

management through a PPGIS application in

PETER A KWAKU KYEM

17 GIS for community forestry user groups in Nepal:

putting people before the technology 232

GAVIN JORDAN

18 Implementing a community-integrated GIS:

perspectives from South African fieldwork 246

TREVOR M HARRIS AND DANIEL WEINER

19 Information technologies, PPGIS, and advocacy:

globalization of resistance to industrial shrimp farming 259

22 Mutualism in strengthening GIS technologies and

democratic principles: perspectives from a GIS software

24 GIS and the artist: shaping the image of a neighbourhood

through participatory environmental design 320

27 Public participation, technological discourses and

STUART C AITKEN

WILLIAM J CRAIG, TREVOR M HARRIS AND DANIEL WEINER

viii Contents

1.1 The citizen participation ladder adapted from Weidemann

and Femers 1993

4.1 South of Market area

4.2 Location of traditional and high-tech industries

4.3 Companies displaced or threatening to leave due to

lifestyle loft displacement

5.1 A West Philadelphia streetscape

5.2 Entire blocks have been demolished in some Philadelphia

neighbourhoods

5.3 License and inspections zoning application

5.4 The neighbourhood information system

6.1 The Powderhorn Park neighbourhood is south of

downtown Minneapolis

6.2 One of the primary benefits of the PPNA’s housing

database has been the ability to make information more

readily available to neighbourhood residents

7.1 Residential code enforcement violations and estimated

compliance cost

7.2 Regions with concentrations of children ages 3 & 4 in

TANF (welfare) households without access to Head Start

and/or Pre-Kindergarten

8.1 Virtual Slaithwaite website

9.1 Patterns of Sprawl This map displays patterns of

development over three decades in Dane County,

Wisconsin It alerted citizens to the idea that development

has become more land consuming and less dense with

population over time

9.2 Citizens participating in land-use allocation exercise

9.3 Planning Resource Center website

(www.lic.wisc.edu/shapingdane)

10.1 The Portland Metro area comprises the urbanized

portion of three counties

65759616668717278

8394

97105

116118119126

10.2 The communications pyramid showing the division of

target populations for public involvement strategies

10.3 MetroMap is an interactive web-based application for

accessing Metro’s GIS data layers

11.1 The Herbert River catchment in northern Australia

11.2 The structure of the Herbert Resource Information

Centre

12.1 Map prepared by the GreenInfo Network for the

Greenbelt Alliance showing open space and farmland

areas at risk for development along US Highway 101

in Silicon Valley, California

12.2 Map prepared for The Nature Conservancy – Lanphere

Christensen Dunes Preserve showing dune vegetation on

the Northern Spit, Humboldt Bay Dunes, California

(courtesy: Travis Aria)

12.3 Map showing proposed fuel breaks (clearances of forest

understory and brush to contain the spread of fire) on

Post Mountain, Trinity County, California

12.4 Map prepared by Legacy – the Landscape Connection

showing the newly created Headwaters Forest Reserve as

well as protected and unprotected mature/old growth

forests in Humboldt County, California

12.5 Map prepared by GreenInfo Network showing spheres of

influence of non-profit organizations engaged in land-use

or urban planning issues in northeastern California

13.1 Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland

14.1 New Jersey land-cover, 1995

14.2 New Jersey’s 566 municipalities

15.1 Ungulate habitat map from the environmental atlas

15.2 Satellite image draped over a DEM of the Upper

Columbia Valley

15.3 Community mural painting effort grew out of the

organizing process of PPGIS

16.1 The study area: forest districts in the Ashanti Region of

Ghana

16.2 Aboma Forest Reserve, fire damage map

16.3 Aboma Forest Reserve, fire hazard potential map

16.4 Best 350 hectares for logging

16.5 Best 400 hectares for preservation

16.6 Conflict map

16.7 Final allocation map

17.1 Farm–forest interactions Farmers collecting animal

fodder and bedding materials from a community forest

x Figures

128131139142

17.2 A systematic methodology for a community forestry

PPGIS

17.3 Women members of a Forest User Group conducting a

participatory photo mapping exercise

18.1 The Central Lowveld case study area, South Africa

18.2 The multiple realities of land potential

18.3 The multiple realities of forced removals

19.1 Intensive shrimp farm in Thailand

19.2 Constructing a shrimp farm along the coast of Honduras

20.1 Two-tiered database for the North Hokianga Project,

New Zealand

20.2 Culturally specific information based upon the World

View informs Tribal water resource management

20.3 Elements of the CSU–PSD spatial information

technologies and geographic education partnership

21.1 Fractionated tribal land in Adair and Sequoyah counties

21.2 Malloy Hollow Road

21.3 Tribal population within Cherokee jurisdiction

22.1 Geography is fundamentally affecting the major forces of

the twenty-first century

22.2 As GIS technology evolves, geographic data will be

imbedded into most information applications and services

22.3 GIS provides the framework for the systematic

measurement of geography

22.4 Building vast spatial data resources from the bottom-up

fosters new scientific knowledge

23.1 Aircraft noise representations for Rantoul, IL c 1991.

23.2 A sequence of vehicular noise representation with a peak of

approximately 85 dbA Taken from an animation of a

motorcycle on Newport Ave., Quincy, MA

24.1 Integrating artists’ sketches, street images, and maps in

ArcView GIS

25.1 Neighbourhood-scale map in Buffalo PPGIS site

25.2 City-scale map in Buffalo PPGIS site

25.3 Identity function in Buffalo PPGIS site

25.4 Comment function in Buffalo PPGIS site

25.5 Change-database function in Buffalo PPGIS site

Figures xi

237239250253255261261274277279285288290298299301303314

315326336337338339340

11.1 A summary of issues covered by the evaluation 145

12.1 Appropriateness matrix: who should or should not use

GIS compared to who does and does not use GIS? 16814.1 1997 surface area of land-cover/land-use in New Jersey,

based on the National Resources Inventory (Natural

14.2 Current membership of the New Jersey Non-Profit GIS

Community and their preferred acronyms 198

Kheir Al-Kodmany is Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning and Policy

Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Stuart C Aitken is Professor in the Department of Geography at San Diego

State University in San Diego, California

Michael Barndt is Coordinator of the Data Center Program at the

Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee At the time of this research, Michaelwas also Associate Professor of Urban Studies Programs at the University

County, Georgia He is a Ph.D candidate in City and Regional Planning

at the Georgia Institute of Technology and was, at the time of this research,Project Manager with Georgia Tech’s Data and Policy Analysis Group(DAPA)

Liza Casey is Senior Consultant of ESRI Inc in Washington DC At the time

of this research, Liza was Director of Enterprise GIS, City of Philadelphia

Richard E Chenoweth is Professor in the Department of Urban and

Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alison Cottrell is Lecturer in the Department of Tropical, Environmental

Studies and Geography at James Cook University in Townsville,Australia

Paul Couey is GIS Communications Specialist at Metro in Portland, Oregon William J Craig is Associate Director at the Center for Urban and Regional

Affairs and Co-Director of the Master of Geographic InformationScience Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

xvi Contributors

Jack Dangermond is President of ESRI Inc in Redlands, California Raymond de Lai is Centre Manager of the Herbert Resource Information

Centre in Ingham, Australia

John Donovan is Public Involvement Specialist at Metro in Portland, Oregon Sarah Elwood is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at

DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois At the time of this research, Sarahwas a Ph.D candidate in Geography at the University of Minnesota

Gisela Frias is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Geography at McGill

University in Montréal, Canada

Trevor M Harris is Eberly Professor of Geography and Chair of the

Depart-ment of Geology and Geography at West Virginia University inMorgantown, West Virginia

Andrew K L Johnson is Principle Research Scientist at CSIRO Sustainable

Ecosystems in Brisbane, Australia

Gavin Jordan is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Forestry at the

University of Central Lancashire in Carlisle, England

Richard Kingston is Research Officer in the School of Geography at the

University of Leeds, England

John B Krygier is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of

Geology and Geography at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio

Peter A Kwaku Kyem is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography

at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut

Melinda Laituri is Associate Professor in the Department of Earth

Resources at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado

Anne M Leitch is Journalist at the CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in

Brisbane, Australia

Helga Leitner is Professor in the Department of Geography at the

University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

Robert B McMaster is Professor in the Department of Geography at the

University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

Susanna McMaster is Associate Program Director of Master of Geographic

Information Science Program at the University of Minnesota inMinneapolis

Paul Macnab is Oceans Policy Officer at Fisheries and Oceans Canada in

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada At the time of this research, Paul was a uate student in the Department of Geography at the University of Waterloo

grad-Contributors xvii

Thomas C Meredith is Associate Professor in the Department of

Geography at McGill University in Montréal, Canada Thomas is also aprincipal of McGill University’s Community-Based EnvironmentalDecision Support (CBED) project

Bernard J Niemann, Jr is Professor in the Department of Urban and

Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Cheryl Parker is Principal at Urban Explorer in Berkeley, California (www.theurbanexplorer.com) At the time of this writing, Cheryl was EconomicDevelopment Specialist at the South of Market Foundation

Amelita Pascual is Manager of the Department of Cellular and Molecular

Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco At thetime of this writing, Amelita was Executive Director of the South ofMarket Foundation

Tom Pederson, ESRI Inc in New York City At the time of the research,

Tom was finishing his Ph.D in City Planning and serving as Director ofResearch and Development at the Cartographic Modeling Lab,University of Pennsylvania

David Randall Peterman is Transportation Analyst at the Congressional

Research Service, Library of Congress in Washington, DC He is a Ph.D.Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute ofTechnology

David Pullar is Lecturer in the Department of Geographical Sciences &

Planning at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia

Eric Sheppard is Professor in the Department of Geography at the

University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

David S Sawicki is Professor in the City and Regional Planning Program

and in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology

in Atlanta Sawicki is also Director of Georgia Tech’s Data and PolicyAnalysis group (DAPA)

Renée E Sieber is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and

in the School of Environment at McGill University in Montréal, Canada

At the time most of this research was conducted, Renée was a Ph.D didate in Urban Planning at Rutgers University

can-Michael J Shiffer is Associate Professor in the Urban Planning & Policy

Program and Director of the Digital Cities Lab at the University ofIllinois at Chicago

Susan C Stonich is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the

Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Science; she is also chair

xviii Contributors

of the Environmental Studies Program; University of California, SantaBarbara

Todd L Sutphin is Outreach Specialist in the Land Information and

Computer Graphics Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

David L Tulloch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape

Architecture and Associate Director of the Center for Remote Sensingand Spatial Analysis at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NewJersey

Stephen J Ventura is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies

and in the Department of Soil Science at the University of Madison

Wisconsin-Daniel H Walker is Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Sustainable

Ecosystems in Townsville, Australia

Daniel Weiner is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geology and

Geography and Director of the Office of International Programs at WestVirginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia

Gregory G Yetman is Geographic Information Specialist in the Center for

International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at ColumbiaUniversity in New York City At the time of this research, Gregory was

a graduate student in the Geography Department, McGill University

It is now almost 40 years since Roger Tomlinson coined the term

geo-graphic information system (GIS), and led the development of the world’s

first, the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), in the mid-1960s(for a history of GIS see Foresman 1998) Today’s technology would bealmost unrecognizable to the pioneers of the 1960s, not only because of thealmost unbelievable advances in information technology (IT) that haveoccurred since then, but also because of dramatic changes in the function-ality, appearance, use, and societal context of GIS This book addresses one

of the most recent manifestations of those changes, the developing use ofGIS by grassroots community organizations, and participation in its use byordinary citizens

Early GIS was massively expensive CGIS required a large, dedicatedmainframe computer costing several millions of 1965 dollars; the develop-ment of hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code in very primitiveprogramming language; and the invention of novel devices for convertingmaps to digital form Although the project was based on sound cost-bene-fit analysis, the technical problems of building CGIS were such that by theearly 1970s, and despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars, CGISwas essentially unable to deliver the results that had been promised toits sponsors, and several more years of effort were required to bring it tooperational status

CGIS was a child of its time Only senior governments were able to affordthe cost of early GIS, and only skilled experts were able to do successful bat-tle with its primitive interfaces As with other early computer applications,early GIS was designed to augment the limited and fallible skills of humans,

by performing tasks that humans found too difficult, tedious, or inaccuratewhen done by hand; in the case of CGIS, these tasks included measuringareas from maps, and overlaying maps, both on a massive scale In essence,CGIS was performing the geographic equivalent of other applications driv-ing early computer development – the massive numerical simulations ofnuclear explosions being performed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, orthe massive cryptographic computations of the National Security Agency

xx Foreword

Early computers quickly gained a popular image of mechanical efficiency,lightning speed, and perfect accuracy that was in sharp contrast to supposedhuman characteristics of clumsiness, sluggishness, and vagueness As such,both they and GIS fed the human appetite for enlightenment Computerizedmaps would replace the stained, creased, and tattered maps of the glovecompartment Instead of inaccurate maps recording someone’s impression ofland-use at some undetermined point in the past, the civilian remote sensingsatellites that began to appear in the early 1970s would continuously moni-tor the Earth’s surface and ensure a constant, up-to-date, and precise digitalrecord

Early GIS was also firmly grounded in science, and its associated ideas ofobjectivity and replicability We knew, of course, that some of the data beingentered into CGIS had been invented by poorly-paid undergraduates idling

in coffee shops, but once in the computer and stripped of this awkwardhuman lineage the data appeared to all intents and purposes as if they hadbeen measured by the most precise of scientific instruments The scientificmeasurement model dominated early thinking in GIS, and may have reachedits apogee in the Digital Earth speech of Vice President Al Gore in 1998,describing a future in which it would be possible to enter and explore a vir-tual world based on a perfect digital replica of the planet that includedmeasurements of practically everything

Early GIS was not surprisingly much more attractive to users whose cations lay in the physical and natural sciences, than in the social sciences.Although GIS made useful inroads into marketing and site selection (Martin1996), by and large it was the physical aspects of the planet that dominatedearly GIS use GIS was adopted by forest management agencies and lumbercompanies; by engineering consultants and utility companies; by Earth sys-tem scientists, landscape ecologists, and agronomists But only recently hasthere been substantial interest among sociologists, economists, and politicalscientists in the potential of GIS to elucidate social processes (for more onthe social science applications of GIS see CSISS.org)

appli-Many factors have contributed to the evolution of GIS over the past 40years, and brought it to the state in which we find it today First and perhapsforemost is the cost of hardware The power of the multimillion-dollar com-puter used by CGIS is now vastly exceeded by the average laptop, and themost advanced GIS applications now run on computers costing less than

$2,000 At this level, GIS is affordable by many libraries, schools, holds, and community organizations, although it is still far beyond the reach

house-of others, particularly in developing countries The cost house-of shouse-oftware has alsodropped substantially, in tandem with the cost of hardware, as demand forboth has grown

Second, developers of GIS software have made great progress in ing use through improved user interfaces Early GIS required its users tolearn its specialized language, and by the late 1980s command languages

facilitat-Foreword xxi

had grown to include thousands of terms, to be used in precise and forgiving syntax But the early 1990s brought WIMP (windows, icons,menus, pointers) interfaces into the computing mainstream Learning to useGIS is still a challenge, but it is now at least possible for children in ele-mentary school to use it effectively We are still a long way from the kind

un-of intuitive interface that would be readily usable by a child un-of ten, butGIS users no longer require skills comparable in complexity and sophistica-tion to those of concert pianists

This trend towards more intuitive interfaces is part of a deeper, thirdtrend, towards a more human-centric vision of GIS Researchers in the early

1990s noted how GIS interfaces were essentially intrusive, requiring their

users to learn the system’s language, rather than adopting the intuitive guage of humans We humans work every day with geographic information,

lan-as we share driving directions, describe distant places to each other, or son about the information we acquire through our senses Much is knownabout how children acquire spatial skills, and how they build mentalmodels of their surroundings If the conceptual structures of GIS weresimilar, it was argued, then GIS would be necessarily easier to use, and acc-essible to a much larger proportion of the general public, including child-ren GIS researchers began to discover cognitive science, and those parts

rea-of linguistics that deal with concepts about the geographic world (Frankand Mark 1991)

Human discourse is inherently vague, and science has long been concernedwith providing an alternative to vague subjectivity Instead of describingthings as hot or cold, scientists measure temperature on standard scales inorder to ensure replicability and shared meaning, and early GIS similarlyimposed requirements of precision on its users, forcing them to replace

vague terms like near with precise measurements of distance So, while on

the one hand this ensured objectivity and meaningfulness, it also acted as afilter Human discourse is vague, but it is at the same time semantically rich,with nuances that allow one word to have many context-specific shades ofmeaning By comparison, the scientific GIS is precise, but also crude in itssimplicity

The final twist in this transition was brought about by the IT revolution

of the 1990s, which not only put computers into the hands of millions, butdemanded that they address everyday needs No longer would users berequired to learn the language of computers – the new software interfaces

of the 1990s were designed to do something useful for the average son almost immediately upon installation The spreadsheet software of the1980s probably did the most to precipitate this trend, but by the late 1990s,even GIS was starting to enter the application mainstream Computers arenow seen not as calculating wizards but as connections to the Internet, pro-viding essential channels of communication between humans (Goodchild2000) By extension, a GIS was no longer a way of doing things that humans