Regenerating our increasingly polluted, worn-out urban infrastructure is becoming the singly most important challenge facing our cities. Simon Doyle and Michael Batty explain how spatial information technologies and online laboratories can enable many diverse interests to participate in creating informed planning policies that best address these issues

Batty, M

Doyle, S

English

UCL Discovery

Centre for Advanced Spatial AnalysisUniversity College London1-19 Torrington PlaceGower StreetLondon      WC1E 6BTTel: +44 (0) 171 391 1782Fax: +44 (0) 171 813 2843Email: casa@ucl.ac.ukhttp://www.casa.ucl.ac.ukhttp://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/virtual_regeneration.pdfDate: October 1998ISSN: 1467-1298© Copyright CASA, UCL.1ABSTRACTRegenerating our increasingly polluted, worn-out urban infrastructure is becomingthe singly most important challenge facing our cities. Simon Doyle and MichaelBatty explain how spatial information technologies and online laboratories canenable many diverse interests to participate in creating informed planning policiesthat best address these issues.Western cities, like their populations, are ageing. Their renewal in ways that alleviate the pollutionand conflict over the use of public resources that increasing wealth is bringing will be the criticalplanning problem of the new millennium. In Britain, this debate is currently nowhere morepolarized than around the issue of where we should accommodate over 4 million new householdswhich will be created over the next 20 years due to the demand for new lifestyles in the wake of thebreak-up of the nuclear family. Whether or not these should be housed on greenfield or brownfieldsites, on the edge of cities or within existing towns, is the focal issue.These kinds of problem cannot be tackled by expert professionals using single disciplinary sciences.They are intrinsically systemic, require methods which integrate engineering with economics andthe sciences of the natural environment, and are set within a social and organisational milieu whichembraces many different, often conflicting ethical and political perspectives. The taskforce led byLord Rogers which is inquiring into the problems of bringing brownfield sites back into residentialuse has to grapple not only with whether it is scientifically and even economically feasible todecontaminate such sites but whether such sites are likely to be available for housing. This involvesquestions of ownership and the market for land, whether or not such sites are near to existing (andfuture) centres of employment, transportation and retailing, and whether or not such in-citydevelopment is able to preserve and enhance the green space so necessary for urban living.Hitherto, these problems have been tackled using the Town and Country Planning system. But ascities have become more complex and diverse, it has been increasingly difficult to integrate therequisite science with the requisite politics necessary to produce effective and workable plans. Newtechnologies however seem to hold the key to effective action. In the last 10 years, spatial orgeographic information systems (GIS) have emerged which are able to integrate many differenttypes of socio-economic, physical and bio-ecological data in ways that make these comparable,even commensurable. Representing such data digitally is making such integration possible,providing a more systemic understanding of urban problems. Advances in visualising data usingvarious types of multimedia such as 3-d fly-through, and textual/photo-realistic enhancement, areforcing such systems towards virtual reality (VR), thus adding new ways of incorporatingqualitative insights.2At the same time, such software systems are fast moving to the net and it is this ability to interactwith such systems remotely that holds the key to new ways of developing appropriate solutions.The idea of virtual laboratories which bring experts at remote locations together to share data andexpertise and to develop new levels of collaborative science, is not new but extending the idea toinvolve a very wide public with widely different levels of interest and skill concerning urbanproblems which can only be resolved consensually, is. This is only now becoming possible due tothe massive proliferation of the internet and clever ways of treating problems that intrinsicallyinvolve participation and cannot be addressed without it.Urban environmental problems require many different types of data concerning the way economicactivities in cities compete for land, thus generating both benign and polluting impacts whoseeffects vary widely on different groups within the population. Hitherto, these effects have eitherbeen ignored or at best handled somewhat badly by the existing urban planning system which hasbeen rarely provided with enough intelligence concerning the way different environmental systemsinteract. Widening the scope of such concern has not been easy using traditional public participationbut the idea that such issues might be put into the much domain of the internet is being seized uponas a means of widening access to many interested parties. many web sites now exist which aim toinvolve, albeit passively, a wider public in such issues.In London, we are going well beyond this kind of dissemination which at best raises awareness. Weare devising a system based on information through which any user can make sense of the urbanenvironment while beginning some rudimentary data analysis. We are structuring the system so thatusers can interact with it on different levels, dependent upon their interest and expertise. Itsorganisation is modular, built from a loose confederation of other systems linked across the net. It ishierarchical in that different groups have different levels of access. It is interactive in that users canupload and down load data but more importantly engage in dialogue with one another throughbulletin board-like conversations. The system proffers potential users a range of tools to engage infurther analysis of data but also to visualise data in different modes - as maps, as 3-d models and soon. At the same time, it offers users the power to pose and react to policy questions and to evenbegin the construction of policies that address the critical problems raised. The pilot model fromwhich the illustrations here are drawn operates at all scales from the metropolitan-wide area ofGreater London itself down to specific sites at the level of building parcels and plots.At the heart of the system lies a spatial database which is accessed using a GIS, configured in such away that it is able to deliver information to users across the internet in response to remote queries ofthe data. In fact, as the system is modular, it extends into a series of GISs which draw on differentdatabases and are co-ordinated in such a way as to draw and display data from different systems in a3seamless fashion. It is supported by sets of functions, some custom-built but many of which are partof the standard GIS toolbox. These enable users to map and visualise different data sets, performqueries of the data and extract specific features while extending this capability to simple forecastsof trends and assessments of impacts.The system is accessible through any standard internet browser which makes use of the world wideweb. The 2-dimensional map lies at the core of the system but the ability to view data in 3d or asphotographic images, video clips or abstracted animations is standard through any path the usermight take in viewing data as we can show for many different areas of London such as centralWestminster.We can illustrate best how the system is useful for urban regeneration using some of the casestudies currently part of the framework. At the metropolitan level, data from the 1991 Census ofPopulation, from Ordnance Survey and other data providers in the quasi-public domain are part ofthe system. We also have extensive data on local pollution, from the London Research Centre’sGreater London Atmospheric Emissions database, and we have linked the system online to theNational Air Quality Information Archive web pages which contain data on pollutants recorded at68 sites across London. This data is available hourly for 5 major pollutants and 4 particulates. It ispossible for any user to download this data and to use standard GIS and CAD tools to display it in2-d and/or 3-d. The concentration of nitrous oxides (N0x) can  be  visualised as a contour map or asa 3-d surface. Visualising data in this way brings many advantages. At one level, it is a reality checkin that errors in data can be spotted while the more important policy use is in setting up a visualbase of data which informs discussion. There are important scientific problems in representing dataat different scales but in the London context, the high concentrations in Hackney, Brent andCroydon require explanations which involve synthesising local knowledge of these places with thetechniques used to record and then visualise the data in the first place.4Fig 1: How a User Interacts with the System RemotelyThe map of Parliament Square on the left is the output from the internet GISdisplayed on the ‘client’ which gives the user options for viewing different‘layers’ of data. When an option is selected, this request is sent to the centraldata base at a remote location on the ‘host’, is processed and back comesthe map. If the user activates a ‘hotlink’ on the map, then another frame ofinformation is opened up. On the right of the map, this is displayed as a 3-dblock model of central Westminster and the user can then ‘navigate’ aroundit using the controls beneath.Fig 2: Visualising Air Pollution Surfaces across Greater LondonThe map shows contours of concentration which have been interpolated onthe fly by the user around the 68 sites, with the user being able to specify thecolour gradation used to visualise this incidence. The same data can bevisualised as a 3d surface, and the different views show different positions asthe user navigates around the city.5These kinds of metropolitan-wide analysis of pollution only become useful when they arecontrasted against other data with a view to exploring the way different sectors impact and interacton one another. One of the great advantages of using GIS as the engine to store and drive the queryand display of spatial data is that the idea of treating different data by different map layers enablesimmediate comparisons to be made. GISs are very highly tuned to make such comparisons, andthere are many standard functions which can be used to combine, transform, aggregate, exaggeratevarious data layers, thus providing new patterns which can generate new insights about theproblems of the urban environment. A useful example which clearly demonstrates this as well asshowing how important it is to provide links between demography, health, pollution and transportinvolves the delivery of health case in the Riverside Health Trust area (which covers the boroughsof Westminster, Kensington, Hammersmith and part of Ealing). The Trust routinely records thetrips made from local district nurse stations to patients requiring home-based care; one of theirobjectives was to minimise these trips in the first instance because of concerns for both the pollutionbeing added by car trips as well as the monetary expenditure on fuel and vehicles, and the timespent travelling. Various options were being considered ranging from car pooling by nurses to thewholesale relocation of nurses’ stations as well as providing different levels of care to patients inthe home. What the system enabled us to do was to show how different types of information arecorrelated with such trips, such as showing how other emissions data relates to the trip pattern,showing how the density of nurses visits to patients could be correlated with health data from the1991 census, but most importantly it provided a method for showing how the pattern of trips mightbe radically reorganised by linking the nearest nurses to the nearest patients.The almost chaotic pattern of trips in that area of London is contrasted against the pattern that isfeasible by reallocating nurses to patients to minimise distance (and hence pollution generated andmoney expended). Standard functions in GIS are models that enable such spatial reallocation and inthis case, by reallocating trips, around £1m can be saved from the travel budget for the healthauthority simply by changing who visits who, with commensurate reductions in pollution and this isbefore any other changes in location are considered. This example shows how the system is able tohandle data of different types at different scales, metropolitan-wide data providing a frame for localdata.Our last example brings the discussion down to the local scale of brownfield sites. In Kings Cross,developers are excavating a site for the new Channel Tunnel Raillink. The noise and dust from theexcavations are considerable, and although this is typical of any large scale development oncontaminated disused land, it demonstrates the kinds of problems that will be normal if a large scaleredevelopment programme to reclaim inner city sites of this kind for housing is begun. In theseexcavations, Camden are monitoring pollution levels for this reclamation and we visualise these byinterpolating their impact contours. Their visualisation shows how pollution diffuses with distance6from the sites but it also shows how pollution clusters are formed. From these contours, differentlevels of acceptability might be implied and using the internet GIS, users can query what buildingsand land uses are contained within and without certain levels. For example, by defining a certainstandard, the buildings within the affected area which infringes the standard can be identified andthe user can compute the affected population and other characteristics of the impact from relateddata. Imagine this process being operated on a wide area with multiple types of data and multipleviewpoints concerning acceptability being considered and this gives some idea of the potential ofthis approach to exploring and resolving urban environmental problems.Fig 3: Patterns of Health Care Delivery in Inner LondonTypical queries of the system which map the pattern the populationregistered as permanently sick from the 1991 Census (top left) arecontrasted with the pattern of patient visits in west London (top right). Weshow the current “chaotic” pattern of trips made by nurses to patients (bottomleft) and how the same level of service can be achieved much moreefficiently by reallocating nurses to patients (bottom right). 50 percent of thecurrent travel expenditure is reduced by the new pattern (over £1m per year)while the levels of car pollution are cut substantially even before car poolingis considered. With such tools, it is even possible to show that a judiciousrelocation of nurses’ stations, car pooling, the movement of some patientsfrom in-home to outpatient care could both reduce money spent and timeused on travel even more dramatically while at the same time massivelyincreasing the level of patient care.7Fig 4: Pollution Generated from the Redevelopment of Kings Cross SiteThe concentration of dust levels on the site of the new Channel TunnelRaillink is visualised by diffusion contours (left). A contour above which levelsof dust are unacceptable is identified (centre). The buildings that fall withinthis contour from which we can compute the ‘at-risk’ population, can then beselected (right).The kind of environmental problems that can be explored depend ultimately on how the userarticulates the problem in the light of data and information within the system. Its various elementsare also tied together through different forums for interaction, based on opportunities for users toquery the system through email-like requests and to peruse such information which is posted onbulletin boards, responding if appropriate. We envisage that dialogue between users will begin andthat policy maps would emerge from structured and focused discussion concerning environmentalissues. Ways in which users might sketch their ideas visually from remote sites have beendeveloped through new extensions to the GIS software. Dialogue is currently entered, using theOnline Planning Forum which is at present coupled to the system. and this is being rapidly extendedto embrace other relevant interests and decision-making structures. Through its web pages, thesystem is linked to many other relevant sites, for example to the Friends of the Earth, to theDepartment of Environment, Transport and the Regions, to the Sustainable London Trust and so on,enabling users to search out the background to environmental issues but within the perspective ofLondon.8Fig 5: Dialogue and Discussion within the Environmental Information SystemUsers are able to browse a library of different requests and responsesconcerning urban environmental problems, and to submit their owncomments, thus enabling ongoing discussion of important issues and policiesto beginThese are the tools that we consider should be used in exploring questions about urbanenvironments in an integrated way which cross disciplinary, professional, and political divides. Wewould argue that if the quality of life in our cities is to be improved so that all benefit, then it isintrinsically participatory systems like these that must be developed. Only then might we avoidwhat Garret Hardin called the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, where public resources are compromisedby the individual over-exploitation of land use, with pollution impacts that affect us all. In theforthcoming debate about how we might exploit our brownfield sites, this is as important an issuesas the current over-exploitation which such policies are intended to address.9Further ReadingM. Batty, M. Dodge, S. Doyle and A. Smith (1998) Modelling Virtual Environments, in P. A.Longley, S. M. Brooks, R. McDonnell, and B. Macmillan (eds) Geocomputation: A Primer, JohnWiley and Sons, Chichester, UK, pp. 139-161S. Doyle, M. Dodge, and A. Smith (1998) The Potential of Web-Based Mapping and VirtualReality Technologies for Modelling Urban Environments, Computers, Environments and UrbanSystems, 22, (2), 137-155Simon Doyle is GIS Officer in the London Borough of Brent, and Michael Batty isDirector, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, 1-19Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UKsimon.doyle@brent.gov.ukm.batty@ucl.ac.ukweb: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/This work is supported by the Jackson Environment Institute, UCL; the Office ofScience and Technology through their Foresight Challenge Programme; and theSouthern Office of the Environment Agency

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