Urban Planning – Sim City style

BBC News has a nice article about MetroQuest, a software application that uses a Sim City-like visual interface to allow users to model how urban planning decisions might affect the city over the next 40 years. MetroQuest has been used by planners in several places, including Manchester, England and Bali in Indonesia. By allowing users to visualize geographic information in ways that more closely represent real-world features, tools like MetroQuest can help increase participation in planning decisions by reducing the level of cartographic expertise required to understand what it is being represented. There’s a whole subdiscipline known as PGIS, or participatory GIS, that looks at ways to include the public in decision-making processes that are supported by GIS, and visualization tools like MetroQuest would fit right into those types of projects.