Requesting help from the greater UP Community for a research project

[Giorgos]

Hi Everyone, This is my first post to Cyburbia so please bare with the length of it.

I am a professor working on GIS related issues in Syracuse, NY - no urban planning experience to speak of. I have done some work on urban growth prediction models (UGPM) using GIS and now with a collaborator we are working on a review paper on different mathematical models used for UGPM.

As we were progressing with the review we realized that there is a significant gap between the developers and the users of these models, in other words the modelers do not coordinate with the planners.

This is where we need your help. We would like to prepare a questionnaire for the urban planning community to respond on their UGPM experience, for example how frequently they use them, current limitations and ideas for improvement (i.e. you could of it as a reality check for the modelers).

The purpose of this thread is dual:

1) Help us by posting short messages of your experience (3-5 lines) - we will use this information to fine tune our questionnaire. If you have interesting questions to be added to the questionnaire feel free to post them as well.

2) Help us disseminate the questionnaire once it is developed to the UP community. We have no connections in this community so any listservs for example would be highly appreciated, maybe a few moderators from Cyburbia could also help spread the word.

Thank you in advance and looking forward to your feedback,
Giorgos

[ColoGI]

Hi Everyone, This is my first post to Cyburbia so please bare with the length of it.

I am a professor working on GIS related issues in Syracuse, NY - no urban planning experience to speak of. I have done some work on urban growth prediction models (UGPM) using GIS and now with a collaborator we are working on a review paper on different mathematical models used for UGPM.

As we were progressing with the review we realized that there is a significant gap between the developers and the users of these models, in other words the modelers do not coordinate with the planners.

Thank you in advance and looking forward to your feedback,
Giorgos

OK, I'll give 'er a whirl: IMHO most of us on this board don't use such software due to budgetary constraints or job descriptions or both. I'd contact a Metropolitan Planning Organization or a Council of Governments and see if they use such software. SACOG comes immediately to mind.

.02

[Cardinal]

I would agree with ColoGI. Most of the planning projects we undertake as local government planners, and even as consultants, do not require this kind of analysis. More likely, we will undertake a market analysis to predict growth potential within the study area. Regional and transportation planners - and then only in metropolitan areas - are the only ones who may find value in these models.