What do you want your community to look like? Unfortunately, real life can be a little more complicated than The Sims or Animal Crossing, and balancing the needs of all stakeholders is tricky when planning or expanding communities!

Dr. Robert Newell showcases a participatory process for developing tools for community planning. It includes a novel way to communicate planning options through detailed models that can be visited virtually and explored.

Exploring one of the visualizations for different community scenarios

The Spaces, Places and Possibilities research project aimed to address the challenges posed by modelling potential community scenarios. Models are good tools for community planning because they show relationships and outcomes of local development strategies and decisions but deciding what to include in models is difficult. Including all aspects of a community and local environment is not possible, whereas including too few aspects leads to a non-representative model. Model outputs can also be highly complex, appearing somewhat abstract to users and making it difficult for stakeholders, especially community members, to fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of different scenarios. The Spaces, Places and Possibilities process involved local government and stakeholders in the design and development of a scenario modelling and community planning tools. Although the project was conducted in Squamish, its participatory approach can be adapted to communities across the world.

About the Speaker

Dr. Robert Newell works in the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley (Abbotsford, BC, Canada), and he is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University (Victoria, BC, Canada). Newell teaches courses on critical sustainability issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss and approaches to sustainable community development. His research focuses on integrated planning, and he examines the use of systems models and visualizations as tools for supporting local planning and decision-making. Newell aims to create tools for facilitating more inclusive, collaborative approaches to planning, and his research involves using video game development software to build realistic, interactive visualizations for participatory planning and stakeholder engagement.

This event is delivered in partnership with Waterloo Public Library.