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This article sought to present a process of abrupt transition where technological innovation is concerned. The matter taken up in particular was accelerating digitalisation, in the wider context of digital transformation, and in this case, in reference to spatial planning issues. This article offers an assessment of the level of digitalisation and digital transformation of spatial planning, with this, in turn, making it possible to define the potential at the disposal of rural areas, as they seek to bring in the idea of smart rural development. The empirical analyses present herein are founded upon secondary statistical data as well as our own primary data on the subject of geoportals and their functionality in rural parts of the Łódź region (Poland). The assessments of both planning coverage and geoportal functionality reported herein provide insight regarding the potential for rural areas to implement the concept of GeoDesign, as an integral part of “smart rural development”. The research carried out made it clear that only a fifth of rural gminas in the region are of high potential where GeoDesign is concerned, while every third gmina has only very low potential. A further key conclusion is that rural gminas heading along the path of “smart development” may break out of a spatial order existing thus far on the basis of disparities, and a division of regions into a centre and peripheries. This is of major significance in the context of the diffusion of innovation that digitalisation and digital transformation represent.

Geodesign method and tools are extensively used for collaborative decision making focused on different fields such as transportation, land use, and landscape and has been applied in various places around the world. Nowadays, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and more recently AR sandbox are increasingly becoming very popular particularly as a pedagogical tool. This research aims to investigate whether an AR sandbox could enhance the understanding of people around the development of design proposals and their impacts. We explored if AR sandbox could be implemented in a collaborative geodesign workflow. We reported an experiment where people were asked to build new trails using the sandbox and how the trails they designed were integrated with a larger design. Results explore opportunities and limitations of implementing AR sandbox in a collaborative geodesign workflow based on the experiment in this paper. Our AR sandbox experiment revealed a wide range of benefits to participants in the trail planning and to the geodesign structure.

City‐building games (CBGs) have a long history of focusing on societal simulation and urban management gameplay, including The Sumerian Game (1964), Micropolis, later named SimCity (1989), and Utopia: Creation of a Nation (1991). In this article, we present the outcomes of a pilot study through which we have developed an innovative process that transfers CBGs’ gameplay actions into real‐world planning systems. To evaluate the interplay between CBG simulation and the real world, we delivered workshops to 140 young people and adults to design their local community in South Lancaster, UK, using Cities: Skylines I and II. A novel approach using GIS and machine learning tools was developed to analyse young people’s planning decisions and needs in the area, focusing on the act of “play” within the game. These analytical tools, which involved the semantic classification of game imagery, yielded insights into land‐use decisions. Through game updates released during the study of Cities: Skylines II, we explored new analytical potential and established a process to extract gameplay results that provide additional urban block and street‐level tools for analysis, from CBG to geogame. The limitations of these approaches include the “black box” nature of the game and its planning model, such as zoning and focus on car‐based infrastructure. However, Cities: Skylines has a large player community and strong potential to turn into a geogame in support of real‐world planning and consultation, engaging communities. This article contributes to the literature with a novel and replicable process and case study. When geogames are applied to real‐world problems, the result is a demonstration of the ability of simulations to inform real‐world decisions.

Rising flood damages have prompted local communities to implement buyout and property acquisition programmes to eliminate repetitive losses for at-risk properties. However, buyouts are often costly to implement and are reactionary solutions to flooding. This study quantifies the benefits of acquiring vacant private properties in flood-prone areas rather than acquiring such properties after they are built up. Using a geodesign framework that integrates concepts and analytical approaches derived from geographical, spatial and statistical-based disciplines, we analyse vacant properties with high development potential that intersect current and future floodplain areas in Houston (TX, USA). We use geospatial proximity analysis to select candidate properties, land-use prediction modelling to estimate future development and sea-level rise and benefit–cost analysis to assess the economic viability of buyouts. The results indicate that cumulative avoided flood losses exceed the cost of vacant land acquisition by a factor of nearly two to one, and up to a factor of ten to one in selected areas. This study emphasizes the benefits of proactive property buyouts that focus on acquiring parcels before they are built up, while also avoiding the social and institutional problems associated with traditional buyout programmes.

Living convenience, as a perceptual quality of life, is gradually playing an increasingly important role in the context of seeking livable cities. A high degree of living convenience positively affects urban vitality, livability, and daily physical activities. However, it is hard to achieve a quantitative measurement of this intangible, subjective issue. This study presents a data-informed analytical approach to measuring the human-scale living convenience using multi-sourced urban data and geodesign techniques. Firstly, according to classical theories, living convenience is translated as the co-presentation of accessed number and diversity of urban facilities. Based on that, this study applies multi-sourced urban data, including points of interest (PoIs), buildings, and street networks, to compute the living convenience of each building in the 15 min community–life circle. Through the geoprocessing tools developed by ArcGIS API for Python (ArcPy), the living convenience of millions of buildings in an entire city can be computed efficiently. Kaifeng City from Henan Province, China, is selected as the case study, and the verification from local experts in urbanism shows high accuracy. The capacity to measure intangible perception exhibits the potential for this analytical approach in urban planning practices. Several explorations have been conducted in this direction, including analyzing the spatial heterogeneity in Kaifeng City and planning decision support for bus station arrangement. In short, this study contributes to the development of human-centered planning by providing continuous measurements of an ‘unmeasurable’ quality across large-scale areas. Insights into the perceptual-based quality and detailed mapping of living conveniences in buildings can assist in efficient planning strategies toward more livable and sustainable urbanism.

This article seeks to propose a waste-management model based on qualitative and quantitative research. Specifically, an analysis of the flow of municipal waste was carried out, with the case involved being that of the biodegradable waste generated in households of Poland’s Łódź Metropolitan Area, which is heterogeneous from the points of view of both settlement structure and land use. The analysis of flows of waste then served an evaluation of the system of waste management in the study area, while also representing an important input into a process of identification of problems and possible solutions via so-called PULL (“Peri-Urban Living Lab”) workshop methodology. Indeed, the research detailed here was participatory throughout (from the stages of problem identification through to conclusion-drawing). All of these stages to the work were kept cohesive through the use of an advanced tool allowing for both analysis of the given area and the devising of strategies by which circular economy could be developed. Specifically, GDSE (GeoDesign Decision Support Environment) programming—devised within the framework of the REPAiR Project—offered opportunities for flows of different kinds of materials and raw materials across space to be identified. It also served in the implementation of Eco-innovative solutions (EIS), as were developed jointly in cooperation with participants of the PULL workshops. The article offers a synthetic presentation of the results of different stages to the research, along with a synthesis relating to the waste-management context, with particular account taken of the development of the circular economy.

In the last decades green infrastructure planning, design, and management have been widely recognized as a way to contribute to reach higher levels of sustainability of development. However, often green infrastructures are considered in a sectoral way, while their design should be more integrated within comprehensive planning and design. The paper proposes the use of geodesign methods and technology to support the early phases of integrated strategic territorial planning, in order to enrich the relationships between the design of green infrastructure and of the other relevant systems via more comprehensive planning and design, and by applying systems thinking. A case study developed with architecture and engineering students under the umbrella of the International Geodesign Collaboration is used, to demonstrate how with intensive geodesign workshops it is possible to create spatially explicit design scenarios which take into account the relationships between green infrastructure and other territorial systems and dynamics. A set of analyses on the case study results of the two scales is used to demonstrate the assumption. It is also argued that geodesign intensive workshops can, in a very short time, contribute to raising the awareness among the participants of collaborative design to the importance of green infrastructure in strategic territorial planning.

The increased frequency of extreme events facing society is placing mounting pressure on cities and regions that need more robust resilience planning against growing uncertainty. Data augmented participatory methods, such as geodesign, offer much promise in supporting strategic planning to make our cities and regions more resilient. In that context, this study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of geodesign practices in resilience planning, through a systematic review of the selected 487 studies available from various bibliographic databases. The results indicate that a total of 75 studies were connected to resilience thinking, with a focus on climate change, floods, and sea level rise risks. A significant cluster of those resilience-related studies worked, especially, on improving sustainability. A detailed analysis of 59 relevant geodesign case studies revealed a strong underlying emphasis on disaster risk reduction and management activities. This study also noticed two prominent approaches among the analysed case studies to future city scenario planning: computational (41 studies), and collaborative (18 studies). It is recommended that an explicit integration of these two approaches into the geodesign approach can assist future city resilience planning endeavours. Thus, future research should further investigate the utility of integrating data-driven modelling and simulation within a collaborative scenario planning process, the usability of digital tools such as planning support systems within a collaborative geodesign framework, and the value of the plan’s performance evaluation during resilience decision-making. Another area for future work is increased community engagement in city resilience practices. The geodesign approach can provide a comprehensive framework for bringing communities, decision-makers, experts, and technologists together to help plan for more resilient city futures. Finally, while geodesign’s explicit role in empirical resilience implementations has been found to be low in this systematic review study, there are significant opportunities to support evidence-based and collaborative city resilience planning and decision-making activities.

Although geodesign techniques have been studied and developed worldwide, there is still a lack of in-depth application of geodesign workflows for redesigning urban river wetlands with characteristics of ecologically engineered landscaping (EEL). The study mainly aims at putting forward a proper approach in the methodological foundation for EEL practices in river wetlands. A typical EEL-oriented project of river restoration in Hangzhou, China, was conducted in this study. Based on in-situ geodata and tools within QGIS, individual geological factors analysis, with the hierarchical analysis method (AHP) and ecological vulnerability evaluation (EVE), was conducted by experts’ voting and the weighted linear combination (WLC) method. Analysis of hydrological-related factors proceeded. This GIS-based analysis with expert knowledge provided comprehensive redesign solutions for the redesign project, i.e., restoration of the riverbed, spatial restoration in the horizontal and vertical dimensions, and integration with the multifunctional design. Detailed three-dimensional models for design practices were developed to present redesigned topology and space accordingly. Terrain, inundation, and visibility analysis proceeded with parametric mapping programs within Grasshopper to check the feasibility. The adapted geodesign-based workflow in the study also applies to the site analysis, sustainable assessment and landscape planning for urban wetlands EEL projects.

With an increasing world population and accelerated urbanization, the development of landscape sustainability remains a challenge for scientists, designers, and multiple stakeholders. Landscape sustainability science (LSS) studies dynamic relationships among landscape pattern, ecosystem services, and human well-being with spatially explicit methods. The design of a sustainable landscape needs both landscape sustainability–related disciplines and digital technologies that have been rapidly developing. GeoDesign is a new design method based on a new generation of information technology, especially spatial information technology, to design land systems. This paper discusses the suitability of GeoDesign for LSS to help design sustainable landscapes. Building on a review of LSS and GeoDesign, we conclude that LSS can utilize GeoDesign as a research method and the designed landscape as a research object to enrich and empower the spatially explicit methodology of LSS. To move forward, we suggest to integrate GeoDesign with LSS from six perspectives: strong/weak sustainability, multiple scales, ecosystem services, sustainability indicators, big data application, and the sense of place. Toward this end, we propose a LSS-based GeoDesign framework that links the six perspectives. We expect that this integration between GeoDesign and LSS will help advance the science and practice of sustainability and bring together many disciplines across natural, social, and design sciences.