00:01…and I want to thank, first of all, Esri, and Jack, and Bill Miller, and others for having us down on this.

00:11I'm going to talk a little bit about the geodesign context, but then I'm going to talk about some real projects that…

00:20…we've been doing within our real nested hierarchy of scales ranging from an area the size of Maine, down to…

00:29…10 kilometers or so. We work in finer scales as well, but I think that this will give the…

00:38…some examples of the approaches that we've been taking in the last couple of years.

00:44Just a bit about 02. We're a small firm, by most standards; 30 people, interdisciplinary…

00:54…landscape architects, planners, geodesign people. And we work in practice areas that really, you know, range from…

01:03…from planning, regional planning, urban design and so on. And we're also very interested in working landscapes.

01:13We feel that it's essential that we…that we be active in areas that…of mining, forestry, agriculture, and so on.

01:23So our perspective is not as a toolmaker, nor is it as an educator, as many of you are here, but rather as a practitioner.

01:37I wanted to just check, though, 'cause I missed the last couple of conferences and I wanted to see, well, really what is…

01:45…this geodesign all about? So how many in the room, show of hands, know what a geo is?

01:52Very good. So a geo is, if you go into the Oxford dictionary, it's an erosional landform like this.

02:02And being a bit of a landform freak, I kind of like that one. But no, it's not that, obviously.

02:09We're talking about the arrangement of uses and human activities on the earth and how it interacts with natural processes…

02:19…and economic processes, for that matter. And if you look at geography really talking about writing and describing…

02:27…about the earth, and design obviously being an intentional act of conceiving it before it's built.

02:36The…if you look at Carl's definition of geodesign, it's changing geography by design. One of the implications of that are…

02:43…it's modular, it can't really be dependent on any single model. It's multiscalar, we're working right across scales…

02:52…and those things have effect from the very broad scale to the very fine scale and policies that are developed at the…

02:59…broad scale have real implications at the fine scales, and vice versa.

03:04We really want to understand that kind of interoperability between scales.

03:09So obviously we're talking about form, pattern, and configuration, and the iterative nature of geodesign where we're…

03:19…running evaluations of our designs using the models in a very iterative way. It's very important.

03:26And I don't think that this is necessarily a new thing, but certainly these kinds of tools are really enabling us in ways that…

03:38…we never had the opportunity to capitalize on before.

03:44I'm not going to go into this too much. You've all seen it probably many, many times, but I just want to emphasize…

03:49…that we use this framework, and have for about 15 years now, on almost every project that we do.

03:57At every scale except my deck, and I didn't use it on my deck, but Carl tells me I could, and probably should have.

04:06That's actually a nice deck, but the importance of this rationalization of the process…

04:15…really can't be overemphasized. This is expensive stuff to do.

04:19And we really want to be able to rationalize every step of the way that we go.

04:28I also think that there are basically three strategies, and they're integrated, that we usually bring to every…at least all of our…

04:39…broad scale projects; governance, a defensive and an offensive strategy, but you start with the defensive strategy.

04:48I'm afraid these are getting clipped a bit, but I'm sure we'll struggle through.

04:53But the defensive strategy is, what is vulnerable in the landscape? What do we want to preserve forever, for that matter?

05:02Some things move around, like old growth forests and so on, but others, like large patches of fescue grassland, don't.

05:09So what are the kinds of things that we want to keep in the landscape? And we have to do that first, or the opportunity…

05:16…cost is enormous. And they vary in terms of the specifics of what that defensive strategy is from place to place…

05:28…but almost all of these apply in most places on earth.

05:32The other issue is really where do we want to develop? What's our offensive strategy?

05:39What's the form of development? What density? What's the pattern? Is it linear, is it aggregated, is it dispersed?

05:45What infrastructure is required, and what services are needed to support that?

05:53And importantly, and I'm not going to talk too much about this, except some of the tools that we've used in…

06:00…or one tool that we've used in coming to decisions is really very important.

06:06How do we judge things? Who's judging them? Are we all at the table? Do we all have an equal vote?

06:12Do I have a veto? Does your vote count twice? Is there a backroom deal going on?

06:18And these are not just formal mechanisms for how things…how decisions to change a place are made, but they're…

06:25… also the informal decisions. Understanding how a farmer decides to drain a wetland, or why he does that, is very important…

06:34…regardless of the fact of there may or may not be regulatory requirements to control his actions.

06:44So I'm going to talk now with…about this nested hierarchy of scales. So the first job that we're going to talk about is…

06:54…the south Saskatchewan River Basin in Alberta. A bit of a misnomer. It's called the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan…

07:03…but it's the South Saskatchewan River Basin. It's about, as I said, the size of Maine, or Austria, 85,000 square kilometers.

07:13Up to 32,000 square miles. And then I'm going to talk about this area in here, which is 15,000 kilometers.

07:22And then nested within that, is an urban watershed that's about 240 square kilometers and then some detailed site design…

07:33…or more detailed site design. There's been a renaissance in regional planning, at least in Alberta.

07:47All of Alberta is being subdivided into major river basins, and regional plans are being prepared for all of them.

07:55The SSRP, as I said, the south end of the province bordering on Montana, the great divide along here…

08:03…Saskatchewan to the east is the second plan to be initiated. The first was the oil sands.

08:09We weren't too interested in doing the land-use plan for the oil sands, as it had largely been planned already.

08:19But the south is a very, very interesting area. And so, we're the chief technical planners on this…on this job.

08:28All kinds of values in the landscape heavily dominated this. This whole area is probably one of the most…

08:38…altered ecosystems anywhere. The mixed grass prairie, but then the Rocky Mountains and so on.

08:44Some very wonderful natural landscapes to the west and you'll see in a moment the highly competitive nature…

08:52…of the values and demands on the land.

08:57We went through kind of a typical process in many ways, in terms of establishing visions of values…

09:04…analyzing existing conditions.

09:06We developed a bunch of scenarios and evaluated them. Some more learning scenarios, though…

09:11…not ones that we really thought were valid, or were likely to be achieved, but certainly the trend.

09:19Trend is always likely to be achieved and is one that Carl has always told me that I…you must do if only to scare people.

09:29Because the future, as it is, planned or unplanned, and as it's unfolding right now, is often a…not where we want to go.

09:39And then we did…we took those learnings and we did some multiple objective optimization modeling that I…

09:46…think is interesting to talk about from this…for this perspective because it's not all about sketching.

09:55We can do some sketching and I'll…at this scale, and I'll show you some, but it's far too complicated for that.

10:02We've got 90 different map layers in this set of information. And it ranges from and these are compressed sets…

10:12…by the way. These are summary maps. Groundwater resources, surface water, there is…this watershed has a fixed…

10:26…available amount of water licensed to it. It's enclosed. There's now a moratorium on more water use in the area.

10:34And it's probably the biggest issue in southern Alberta.

10:40Biodiversity. There's enormous biodiversity in this area, both up in the foothills in montane and rocky mountains…

10:49…down into the mixed grass prairie in the southeast corner. Home to many, many, many endangered species, as well as…

11:00…a wide variety of other important species of interest.

11:06Forestry resources are…they're there, but in the large scheme of things, they're not very important from an economic…

11:16…point of view, others in the forest industry, local forest industry, would argue that they are, but the idea of making…

11:24…two-by-fours out of some of this landscape is hardly its highest and best use, but forestry is necessary to manage…

11:33…the ecological resources of the area. Tons of oil and gas and coal. Like billions and billions of dollars in this area.

11:44And it's licensed. Agricultural resources, enormous. The important agricultural soils in this area.

11:54These are the best soils in the province. And some of the area down in here, irrigated agricultures are the most highly…

12:01…productive lands, in terms of agriculture and pulse crops and things like that, in the country.

12:08Tourism. This is where, you know, Unforgiven and Jesse James…and this is classic west.

12:15This is a wonderful, wonderful landscape. If you haven't visited it, I encourage you to. You won't regret it.

12:22Scenic resources, we've, what we did a bunch of, kind of a high level scenic analysis…

12:29…actually now this has been extended over the entire province.

12:34And these different uses overlap in many ways. And in some areas, more than others, and…but it…so it has to be dealt with.

12:43So how do you deal with those conflicting land uses? So we use Marxan to look at reducing the cost.

12:52How do you, first of all, basically what we did is this. We put together the features of conservation…

12:59…and development potential, and we said, and we identified a set of land uses, one of which was conservation, one…

13:08…of which was agriculture, and forestry, and oil, and gas, and so on, or mixed use, and we said, "What are the targets…

13:17… that you want to achieve in each sector?" And then how do you achieve those targets in these competing sectors while…

13:27…minimizing the costs to other sectors? Not something you do in your head. And not something you'd want to do…

13:35…well, let's…what if we do this? What if we do this? And in an iterative trial and error program.

13:42That's…and in a sense, you don't mind doing it in trial and error, but you want to do it with a machine.

13:48So we had a regional advisory committee that basically, and these are just some of the…some of the areas…

13:56…that go into water security, right. Riparian, wetlands, and so on. There's literally 90 of these different things.

14:02So we took a voting system, an electronic voting system with the regional advisory committee, who was…

14:08…appointed by the government, complete 20 person, wide range of abilities, or interests and so on.

14:17And we used this electronic voting system. And we said, "First of all, what do you want to say. What do you want to keep…

14:23…or what do you want to achieve?" Let's put it that way. How much of it do you want to achieve?

14:30And how badly do you want it? So in a sense, we said, "Okay it's for…so it's riparian areas."

14:37Well, 47 percent of the RAC said that they want most of it. And I'm simplifying it, but that they wanted most of it.

14:47In some cases, you'll see 6 percent of them said they didn't want any wetlands. They didn't care about wetlands.

14:53Some. So, interesting perspective, but nevertheless, it's…that's the way it works, and this is a highly political environment.

15:06These people were selected by the conservative government, very pro-business government in Alberta, and…

15:14…were tasked with driving this land-use plan and advising the minister.

15:20Then we said, "Well, how badly do you want it? Is it critical that you get that, that 47 percent?"

15:28And you look at listed aquatic…these are…these are not endangered, but they're threatened, let's call it, species.

15:34Well, it's only medium. It's only important to half of them at a medium level that they achieve their targets of only…

15:42…achieving half of them out there, of the habitats that are out there.

15:47So at any rate, we took that model and we also looked at kind of big strategic moves, you know, large patches of…

15:57…natural vegetation. Well-connected riparian zones and so on. Stepping-stones across highly altered areas.

16:05And we took this…this is the sketch for the area, and it would be great, in retrospect now…

16:14…to be able to use some of the tools that Eric and Matt were describing and some…

16:20…of the ones we've been working with recently that would automate some of the modeling that we've done.

16:26But we took this…we also did something…a strategy for tourism and recreation. We ran it…the targets and…

16:34…features through Marxan with zones, it's a great program developed at the University of Queensland, originally for…

16:44…marine spatial planning but has a wide, wide application.

16:50And we did thousands of runs of that to come up with an assignment of land use…

17:00…in the area that would meet most objectives, while at the same time reducing the cost to others.

17:15And out of that came this set of conservation areas, which is not insignificant if it's actually adopted.

17:25This area, for instance, will be the largest protected grassland in North America--4,000 square kilometers.

17:32Highly important area. Moving to another scale, the Calgary metropolitan area, 15,000 square kilometers…

17:43…nested within that region. This is a coordinated regional plan for Calgary and the 18 municipalities around it.

17:53We took the defensive strategy of using all kinds of ecological infrastructure to drive an assessment of areas…

18:06…where we don't want to build--riparian buffers, wetlands, major regional corridors, big patches, slopes and ridges…

18:15…stepping stones, we weren't allowed to use this one. We wanted to use it, but politically, we couldn't use it.

18:22We also…species riches we caught by other factors were coincident with it.

18:29This one, again, the most important soils in the area. The RAC voted it down.

18:35We can't use these. We should've used them, I think, for a better plan.

18:39As I say, the most highly productive soils, but there would be no expansion of Calgary, which is right there…

18:45…into that area if that was selected. But we did do, again, a kind of a sketch concept problem and we came up…

18:54…with this ecological infrastructure that we were going to use and we simply excluded that from development.

19:01That was a simple matter. It wasn't…excluded it wherever we could. And we took a number of development types.

19:09You have the kind of standard planetary disease that you have everywhere, and a number of existing development types.

19:18Some others that were more transit-oriented, villages, and so on, towns, compact development.

19:26And then we built a tool. Now this is before the… we were involved with the magicians here, but we have some…

19:36…good guys in our office, as well. We certainly do. And so we built a paint tool and we took the legal…

19:46…subdivisions, which are 40 acres each, and we crossed them with the ecological infrastructure and we said…

19:52…"Well, you can't build in there." And then we took the paint tool of the various land-use types and we painted it in…

20:00…where we thought it should go according to our…according to three different scenarios.

20:10So these learning scenarios; a trend, an ecological scenario that really focused on complete protection of the…

20:16…ecological infrastructure, and then a nodes and corridors, which was more oriented to very efficient servicing.

20:26But we took those later and combined them into a proposed concept which looked at nodes and corridors, while at…

20:31…the same time, protecting that ecological infrastructure.

20:36And we came up with this. This green, I believe, I'm color blind, but I'm pretty sure it's green, is where we did not build.

20:44And there's lots of room left to build. So, I mean, so this didn't have to get very sophisticated, really, in terms of…

20:53…of competing land uses like with the Marxan model.

20:59The results are, the trend takes a 125,000 hectares. More…almost a time and a half the size of what Calgary is now…

21:07…to accommodate the next million and a half, or million point seven…million people.

21:13Nodes and corridors far less. The ecocultural…ecologically culturally sensitive scenario was the best.

21:21Then we ran it through, then we ran it through all of our evaluation models, as well.

21:26Some of which informed the ecological infrastructure to begin with, but we ran them against area of natural vegetation…

21:34…population area, total impervious area, development on alluvial soils, et cetera. And we visualized it.

21:44This is pretty simple visualization. We have movies, and so on, of it, but this is the trend and this is what was proposed.

21:52A kind of a combination of, of the ecological and the nodes and corridors.

22:04We also used VNS, or Visual Nature Studio, to help visualize some of it. Next scale.

22:12This, again, you saw Calgary. This is within that metropolitan area.

22:16There's about a 300 square…3 and a half…360 square-mile area of this watershed of Nose Creek. Highly modified area.

22:28This is Calgary's boundary. I'm just going to focus on this area.

22:32We were asked to look at what's the coincidence between good planning and good watershed management…

22:40…at the urban level? Not much, unfortunately, is the answer.

22:44But, so, what are the best practices that are out there, and what is the gaps that Calgary faces, and what…

22:51…about some future scenario modeling to show how things might be improved?

22:57So, the area we're looking at is about 241 square kilometers. Keep an eye on this area, about 10 square kilometers…

23:05…we're going to focus on later. Urbanization effects. I don't have to go into much detail here.

23:11We know that the more we urbanize, the more impervious services they have. The spikier the hydrograph…

23:17…the more flooding we have, the more pollution we have, et cetera, et cetera.

23:21Interaction between land use, planning and watershed management is inseparable, but, unfortunately not addressed…

23:31…at the same time usually. But if you look at imperviousness, for instance, as a watershed…

23:38…the percent of the watershed that is impervious increases, it becomes more and more degraded.

23:46So, degraded, well, it's not really a threshold, but a fuzzy boundary up here, but say, let's say boundary…

23:53…degraded is 26 percent. Well, we mapped the entire impervious area, impervious and pervious areas of Calgary…

24:04…by going in and…using imagery and so on, and extracting and other files, and extracting footprints, et cetera…

24:11…and we found that the whole Nose Creek is about 9 percent, so it's stressed, but the area within Calgary itself is…

24:21…already degraded. Well, we had to take one look at the stream, take one sample, we knew that.

24:29And there's things that can be done at multiple scales; the whole watershed, at community scales, at the site design and so on.

24:36We looked at, and gave a scorecard to what Calgary was doing and most…they've got a lot on the books, actually.

24:45Got a very, very forward thinking water resources department. One of the best in the country, I would, I would easily say.

24:53But the linkage with planning is just not been there, you know. But the big things that can be done to improve a base flow…

25:05…retention, is really done at the site scale, and it's the aggregation of all those site scale things that really is important.

25:17And 96 percent, it just so…is if you did all the low impact development techniques that we have out there right now…

25:26…using a water balance model that the city has that we've been using, if you did all those things, you would meet…

25:33…approximately 96 percent of the retention of the big flows in a big storm.

25:41That happens to be now regulated. There's a regulation for Nose Creek that by 2017, the city must meet 97 percent.

25:53Well, they can't do it. The current plans make it, make it very…it's impossible to do that.

26:02Unless they completely bring in low impact development and retrofit old communities and so on.

26:10So, we developed three, a baseline and then a conventional scenario where we looked at, with 10 percent open space where…

26:24…in the area and then another one where we increase the open space to 25 percent, which seemed to be about the area if it…

26:33…was just looking at open space, impervious area, using the water balance model, that we could meet the...

26:38…regulatory requirements. So we need two and a half times what is currently in legislation and the…

26:48…so if we have a baseline right now, right now let's say…

26:52…there's no change in runoff volume, conventional, it's going to go up by 66 percent, not…let alone meet the targets.

27:02With LID everywhere, it'll go up 3 percent, and with retrofits in the existing communities, it'll drop.

27:13So basically, we have to do LID. We have to plan the city completely differently if we want to meet those targets.

27:20And if we want to meet the targets, and part of it means that we have more open space, higher density, but more open space.

27:27Roughly two and a half times as much open space as we do now. Well, it makes a difference how we configure it.

27:34And with the benefits, the collateral benefits are to other areas.

27:38And that's really what drew us to looking at new and better ways of enhancing that job.

27:49So, we came and this I want to recognize for, certainly Bill Miller, Matt Baker, Eric Wittner, Christian Gass…

27:57…and Bill Souter for most of this work, frankly.

28:05So we looked…zooming in on an area, I want to show you some 2D, some 2D kind of ways that we might look at this…

28:13…and I know some of this has been talked about. See how I'm doing for time.

28:19I've got 15 minutes. Just about right, I think.

28:24So, 10 square kilometers. Something that might be typical of what we would call, pardon me…

28:31…an area structure plan. Now I'm sure you've got equivalent plans that you do, regulatory plans down here, but…

28:40…we thought this would be a good scale to test an approach. And so, again, you know, there's a whole set of…

28:48…of models, but we really wanted to run evaluation models and process and evaluation models to look at how…

28:59…what kind of the baseline is right now. We wanted to understand what use…we wanted to use some stakeholder input…

29:06…to rank the relative importance of the input, so this was carried out…this was really a work in progress.

29:11I want to emphasize that right now.

29:16We then wanted to sketch out a community scale land-use plan in consideration of the outputs of this, of these evaluation models.

29:25And we wanted to assess the impacts of the plan, and then iterate it.

29:30So we developed vulnerability and suitability maps from ecological infrastructure, habitat suitability for a number…

29:37…of species; sprigs, pipit, and white-tailed deer, and so on. Some terrain suitability, soils, et cetera, et cetera.

29:48And some of the access to existing transportation that should be considered.

29:57We use those to develop, you know, the vulnerability and suitability maps which would inform a defensive strategy…

30:05…and an offensive strategy. Defensive strategy again, we took all of those things, we did a weighted average vulnerability…

30:13…you can argue about that, but you can change that in these geodesign tools if you don't like it.

30:19The relative importance of each of these pieces. The maps and so on, ending up for suitability.

30:29We use those so our study area is actually up in this area. So if you go back in here, there are a few areas of concern…

30:39…in terms of vulnerability, but they're…but on the whole, it's not too bad.

30:45Again, here we are, it's up in this area that we'll be looking at a little bit more closely.

30:51Now we could have done it over the whole area. Almost all this area is already developed.

30:56This is parkland and so on, over here. This is actually the largest urban park in Canada, Nose Hill Park.

31:04And then we use this dashboard manager to link the models to Excel and to be able to run the outputs both in and out…

31:18…of Excel so that we could use some of their charting and their conditional formatting and also control…

31:27…the model parameters.

31:28So, for instance, this is just an example of how controlling the model parameters will change the output map.

31:35I mean it's pretty…in a sense, conceptually pretty simple, but pretty important actually because you know…

31:41…when you start talking about, well, what's a large patch? How big is big? And how big is big enough?

31:47And what is the threshold of it? So we looked at two different maps done with just changing the thresholds.

31:56And the…where the permanent stream buffer width, and so on. These are simple, but it's really handy.

32:05The tool is great. And then habitat vulnerability.

32:11How importance…how much importance are we going to place on white-tailed deer habitat in the overall ranking?

32:17Those are just slider bars that we, that we can move. So then we start, we take those maps and we move into a…

32:26…sketching environment. And the sketching, in this we have the sketching palette with the different land-use types.

32:37And then we have summaries of the sketch attributes coming out of it and the different model layers that we're using…

32:43…underneath it. Start out with a…just a base layer and we bring in our vulnerability.

32:53We bring in our suitability. And we start sketching parks and ecological reserves and major roads and so on.

33:03Just sketching those in. And nodes and major nodes and centers. And I'm showing you the one…just a…one scenario…

33:15…here at the moment. And then we sketch in the various land uses, complete the road network…

33:25…and we have a completed sketch in 2D. And we run that through a series of models as well, to iterate that and to a point…

33:36…that we're reasonably happy with it and we kick it out to 3D. But these are the sketches.

33:42Now this is, this is the two planetary disease options. One that actually is more sensitive, conserving some of the…

33:51…ecological infrastructure. This one is a little…is, and I'm not claiming that this is the greatest driven design, but…

33:58…it's certainly more compact, and they all contain the same numbers of people, by the way.

34:04There they are sitting in the watershed. All this hatched area is already developed.

34:09So what happens if we take that kind of type and we…that approach and we run it through our watershed.

34:21The community impact, in this case, we're talking about this is through the water balance model, this is just a relative…

34:28…this is in millimeters, but showing the relative impact of the different changes.

34:33So here's baseline conventional throughout the whole watershed that we just showed, the urban watershed.

34:39Here's what happens if we just add in our little bit in that one development.

34:44Not much, but if we do it across the watershed, it makes a difference.

34:49And in terms of roads, at the community scale itself, though, we're looking…and road and using roads just as a…

34:58…proxy for infrastructure, you know, deep pipes and so on, we're looking at about a 25 percent savings in infrastructure just…

35:07…by simply by that configuration. Very simple rule of thumb, but it does, it does represent a significant saving.

35:16And so, once we're happy with that 2D sketch process, then we, as I say, we do some…there's some processing…

35:26…that's required before it kicks it out into CityEngine. Now look at that 3D process.

35:32So we've been using, or playing with, with CityEngine. I think that's probably closer to it, really…

35:40…for about a year and a half, two years, and we were really impressed with many of the things about CityEngine.

35:49Being able to generate whole cities, because that's…it's, there's not too many other, in fact I don't know of any…

35:57…other programs that really do it to the level that this one can.

36:01So this is a city output shot. And this is all driven by 3D models of building types, and then a bunch of, of rules…

36:13…related to street width, density, building type, et cetera, et cetera. It can be modified with just these procedural rules.

36:23Very slick. But what we wanted to do was add…we could see the potential for linking it to GIS and so that when we…

36:35…heard that Esri had acquired CityEngine, we were quite excited.

36:41And it can get into all levels of detail, as Eric had shown before, but this is kind of an enhanced…an enhanced output, but…

36:52…from it. But how do you go about it? And so you start though, with that 2D framework and then you move it into CityEngine.

37:01I'll go through that. Again, here we are with the base layer.

37:06We import the land-use sketch that's already been done in 2D. We import the 2D road sketch, just line work.

37:16Then we have CityEngine generate the…plot it basically, generate the road widths and all the plotting types and so on.

37:30So it subdivides the lot. That's very, very good at that. What we'd like to see more of is, is automatic generation of road types.

37:38I'll talk about that in a moment. And then we let it…then we assign it…by each land-use type and each lot, we assign it…

37:49…the different 3D models that go into it. And that's the completed model.

37:58Now that's very, very simple models, but, pardon me, but as you see, I mean, you can have 3D models…

38:07…as complex as you like. It just all takes time.

38:15The nice thing about this is though, that we can now take this and output the parameters of this…

38:28…model back into our evaluation models.

38:33So I'm just going to concentrate on the water balance model because that's probably the most important one.

38:41The workspace, though, so we can set things like lot coverage, setbacks from front and side yards…

38:50…what the density is of footprint, and so on, building form and height and so on. It goes on and on.

39:00But we can also set some low impact development things. What's the percentage, for instance, of absorbent soil…

39:08…or how many…what's the percentage of green roofs that we have in the area?

39:12Or how big is the retention pond? How much pervious paving are we having? And so on.

39:20And we can…so then we can go in and we can iteratively model that, and it'll spring up, and the new city will be there, and so on.

39:29But it'll also have those output [unintelligible] so that, which are very important.

39:34So we look at these water balance model reporting, right.

39:38So it's now [unintelligible] lot area, total impervious area, pervious, total amount of green area, and so on.

39:45These are things that are going to go back into the water balance model, which is quite a simple model.

39:52I mean, I mean it's not, I don't want to downplay it, it's not our model, but it's a peer reviewed model, but it's...

39:58…a spreadsheet, basically. We just go back into that spreadsheet, calculate the outputs and so on, and we start looking at, well…

40:06…what are the impacts of these various techniques used? So, so if we're looking at, you know, the, what is going to…

40:15…really help us most, it's pervious surfaces.

40:18And as we start adding in green roofs and absorbent soils and so on, we keep reducing the amount of runoff.

40:26And we can keep going back and forth and back and forth until we get to a point that we think it's reasonable.

40:31So we ran through, for instance a number of scenarios here to look at the average runoff and it does work.

40:40And, I mean, you can get, as I say, those 3D models could get very, very detailed.

40:46We weren't at that point yet, but I wanted to show though, that it's not only about, you know, modifying the urban…

40:54…the parameters, but there are other things that we can do to change the amount of surface on the area.

41:02For instance, road widths and density and so on. We didn't change things much in here, so you have to watch carefully.

41:08Here we…standard road widths make them just a little bit narrower. And then development footprint right…

41:17…now, make it just a bit more dense and a little…and we probably should have pushed it a little bit farther, and we will.

41:24But what are the results? Well, it does make it…it does make a difference. It's not much.

41:30But there is some difference. If we decrease the road widths, and…but we increase the development footprint, the…

41:38…amount that we did was marginal, but certainly it did respond. So, last slide.

41:45And I have two and a half minutes, so. I won't talk for two and a half minutes, but the…really, what would we…

41:55…like to see next in this stuff. I mean, when I look at how far we've come in the last 20 years, as long as I've been…

42:06…really doing this stuff, I guess, that this kind of scales, I mean, it is absolutely remarkable.

42:14We couldn't possibly have as well considered designs as these kinds of tools allow us.

42:24It's not saying we get there, but they certainly allow us to have them. To have better, to have better…

42:31…and more responsive work. And so that we can actually judge plan A versus plan B in a relatively objective way.

42:41There can be a set of criteria that we, that we agree on up front, and we do that in a consultative, participatory way with…

42:52…those who are really making decisions, and the public.

42:57And we can link those kind of…the importance of those design criteria, or evaluation criteria.

43:04We can link them perhaps, to electronic voting. Maybe it's, God forbid, it's done over the web that…I mean, it could…

43:13…I don't know how far we want to go with this stuff because, I mean, you wouldn't…something to remember…

43:18…we wouldn't consult on how you remove your appendix, would we, to the public?

43:23So there are some professional capability, I think, that, that we want to retain, but at least we can back it up with some very…

43:31…very, I think, possibility of rigorous modeling.

43:35We'd like to see automatic street generation. That would be wonderful to be able to do that.

43:41It's not…apparently it's coming. It's not…we…it's not quite there yet, but it's coming.

43:47And then we'd like to integrate it with other kinds of allocation models, because I don't think sketching is the only way to go here.

43:55And like that Marxsan solution for instance. Like you'd be a month of Sundays to get to the first step.

44:05So if you were trying to do it trial and error. So we need to, to integrate that.

44:11I'd like to see real 3D terrain manipulation as in, I know, Rhino terrain kind of thing where you can just pull things and…

44:20move them around and, and really design in 3D with terrain as well.

44:26And that, in fact, you know, these guys are probably working on that already, but in terms of wrapping up then, I…

44:35…think that what I've tried to show is that there really…there are geodesign approaches right across scales…

44:43…and we could take it down further and further and further.

44:46My favorite scale personally, is right around 15,000 to 20,000 square kilometers. I like that, because you can…

44:55…get to a level…you really can design an entire region.

45:00You can design small countries. Whether or not you achieve the design is very much a political process.

45:12But I think these tools really, really enable us to go places that perhaps we haven't before.

45:21Thank you.

45:30Now I have absolutely nothing to add to that. That was fantastic.

45:35That hits all the bases. I would…if we had one question that anyone would like to ask, we could do that as well.

45:51Alright, so, we have a question here. Mic coming down to you.

45:59So just hang on a second so it's recorded and it's on?

46:06Yeah.

46:07So hold it like an ice cream cone and you're good to go.

46:08Yup, great. Evan Paul, UCSB. Quick question.

46:12One of the powerful integrations you demonstrated was the use of 3D and kind of…that's kind of the bleeding edge…

46:18…of where a lot of planners are trying to incorporate 3D in a way that influences decision making.

46:25You know, with the technology as I've seen it this morning, you know, it really lends itself towards changing the…

46:32…local policy framework towards more form-based coding, things like that.

46:38Has that been your experience of kind of seeing the 3D rendering actually shifts the whole kind of…

46:43…coding conversation in a whole new direction?

46:46Absolutely, actually. You know, talk about participation, community participation. People do…

46:53…not understand zoning maps. People do not understand maps. Most…a lot of professionals don't understand maps.

47:01So if we can…like regular 2D maps, if we can start moving into a 3D environment, particularly at the urban…

47:08…design scale, where, you know, form-based code and I mean, CityEngine is, is purpose built, I think, for form-based code.

47:18And the nice thing about that is that people really do respond to that, and we've found that there's some finer-scale…

47:27…urban design projects I could have shown where we're doing just that.

47:32Where we're, we tried to use, we actually, we did use CityEngine at a finer scale, and it really does help a lot.

47:41And to be able to code it with the kind of stuff that Eric was showing earlier, pretty impressive, and, and real…

47:49…real capability now to do that kind of inbuilding, you know, space analysis, as well as the more traditional…

47:58…zoning analysis, and so on. So, yeah, I see that whole 3D form-based way of moving forward to be very useful.

48:08And certainly in the jurisdictions that we're working in, there's an appetite for that.