Cyburbia, established in 1994, is the Internet's oldest portal and social networking site for urban planners and others interested in cities and the built environment.

Cyburbia includes a very active message board (almost 300,000 messages to date), an image hosting gallery, syndicated feeds of hundreds of planning-related weblogs, and a selective directory of Internet resources relevant to planning and urbanism.

Cyburbia is maintained by its founder, Dan Tasman AICP. The Cyburbia Forums are moderated by a group of volunteers, all professional planners in the United States and Canada.

Cyburbia history

The first incarnation of Cyburbia was established in October 1994 at the University at Buffalo, when a page of links to the few urban planning and architecture-related Web sites then online was created on the personal Web site of the founder.

As the Internet grew, subcategories were added, and the list of links was given a somewhat awkward name; PAIRC, an acronym which stood for "Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Directory" PAIRC was renamed Cyburbia in 1997, after its founder saw the word used as a pseudonym for "cyberspace" in a Wired magazine article.

Cyburbia was gutted and rebuilt in 2001. The Web site indexing program was replaced with In-Link, allowing links to be indexed in a hierarchical directory, like Yahoo and DMOZ. The bulletin board software was replaced with vBulletin, one of the most powerful and popular message board systems favailable. In 2002, an image gallery was added, where users can upload and view planning and built environment-related photos and graphics.

Drupal, an open source content management system, became live in March 2006, and now serves pages at the front end of the site. Feeds of hundreds of planning-related blogs were added to the list of features on Cyburbia. The version of Drupal used on the site is tightly integrated with vBulletin and Photopost.

Planningwiki, a planning-related version of Wikipedia, is in the works.

Cyburbia isn't a commercial venture intended to make a profit, but rather a personal endeavor, created in the spirit of giving something back to the Internet.