"The difficulty of planning the physical environment is that the feedback loops are too long." --Stewart Brand

Unlike other aspects of daily life and work, the act of planning our communities requires an understanding of complex and sometimes counterintuitive processes that unfold over long periods of time. This may be one reason why, in our fast-paced world, the discipline of planning as it is widely practiced has not kept pace with progress in other areas, most notably, science and technology.

Effective decision-making related to planning requires considerable learning on the part of both professionals and citizen-stakeholders. Since much of our individual learning comes from direct personal experience–in other words, feedback from a range of situations and actions–it’s often difficult to understand the slowly evolving consequences of planning in everyday terms.

For this reason, it is important for citizens to use tools to gain a greater understanding of the way planning decisions affect us over time. To this end, many of the tools in this presentation act to compress time. For example, a computer simulation can show the maturing of 50-year-old trees in just a second, or alternative scenarios for the growth of a region 25 years forward can be generated in response to different variables suggested by a live audience.

Other tools enable citizens to see their recommendations turned from thought to design within hours. This rapid response helps to achieve public consensus for innovative plans. Still other tools allow citizens to see that there may already be broad consensus around desired models of growth in their community, even when that model is of higher density than surrounding neighborhoods.

Most importantly, computer tools help citizens plan sustainable communities. The complex problems shared by cities throughout the United States are evidence of the impacts of urban sprawl: increasing traffic congestion and commute times, air pollution, inefficient energy consumption and greater reliance on foreign oil, loss of open space and habitat, inequitable economic resource distribution, and the loss of a sense of community. Community sustainability requires a transition from poorly managed sprawl to land use planning practices that create and maintain efficient infrastructure, ensure close-knit neighborhoods and sense of community, and preserve natural systems.

An efficient infrastructure means resource and energy-efficient buildings, transportation systems and industrial processes. Energy supply and use is an integral part of a community’s economic and environmental infrastructure. Energy conservation and efficiency have multiple benefits. They create jobs, lessen dependence on foreign oil supplies, and reduce air, water and soil pollution. They also help communities retain their wealth through energy savings – money normally sent to the utility company stays within the community’s economy. The decision-support tools listed on this website/CD ROM weave together information about energy use, natural resources, pollution, economics, social demographics, physical design, and pollution.

In all of these cases, tools help shorten the feedback loops essential to the process of regional learning. This is a process that I believe citizens, professionals and elected officials will find stimulating and rewarding.

--Peter Katz

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