This paper focuses on the needs of urban designers, and argues that what urban design is about--understanding the urban realm by finding patterns in the landscape--is theoretically well suited to the adoption of GIS technology. Therefore, the problem is to create tools that serve this aspect of the planning profession. Two main areas emerge as critical. One is creating a toolkit of standard sketch planning functions that takes advantage of the ability of GIS to integrate numerous and disparate data sources. The other involves building into the system a level of customization demanded by the creative professionals engaged in urban design.

To explore this topic, we begin with a review of analytic techniques espoused by urban designers and architects as well as the latest research in using information technologies to clarify complex spatial environments and relationships. With this information in mind, two urban design applications are prototyped. One is a prototype pattern finding application. The goal of this application is to allow the designer to combine their knowledge of the area with the analytic power of GIS to discover hard to find patterns in the city. The second prototype tests the ability of GIS to answer questions that are important to urban designers by applying the techniques Kevin Lynch espoused in The Image of the City (1960) to the City of Boston, Massachusetts. In particular, we try to find nodes (concentrations of activity) using only digital data.

Finally, the paper looks at how this research could be used in an actual urban design project--the redevelopment of Mission Main, a public housing project in Boston.

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Joseph Ferreira Jr.

Title: Adopting Geographic Information Systems to Sketch Planning Needs