Spatial Planning Judgments and Computer Supported Collaborative Planning

ABSTRACT

The role of planning support systems has become closely aligned with the dominant theoretical paradigms – primarily collaborative planning and communicative rationality – within the field of urban planning. However, scholars from Human-Computer Interaction have built a theoretical tradition drawing on Activity Theory, among others, to describe computer supported collaborative learning. Collaboration, from this perspective, represents a form of distributed learning situated within a social interaction. Individuals work with each other and technology to converge on shared conceptual understandings of the problem space and to develop a shared praxis for collaboratively addressing those problems. Instead of the tools talking, technology plays a critical role in helping stakeholders develop a common ground for planning and supporting an activity-aware praxis. I use empirical examples from a planning process on Cape Cod, Massachusetts to illustrate these features of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) for a planning audience. I focus, in particular, on how planning support systems mediate group judgments about space and scale to account for spatial scale mismatches between the Cape’s watersheds and towns.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning support systems
• environmental planning
• communicative planning theory
• water quality
• water resource sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure’s Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring program [grant number OCI-1,135,572], the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education Research and Traineeship Program in Landscape Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes (LEAP) at the University of Illinois at Chicago [grant number 0549245], and a Pre-doctoral Fellowship from the Institute of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Notes on contributors

Dan Milz

Dan Milz is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Planning and Civic Engagement in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on water resource planning and management. In particular, he studies how communities use plans and policies to develop sustainable and resilient water resource systems.