The effects of decision-making on urban form: a tool for supporting planning processes

Abstract

In wide area planning, collaboration and participation are nowadays a common approach to the creation of a land or urban design. Thus, planning involves different kinds of professionals, usually coming from different disciplines and, in particular, speaking different languages. GIS technologies are generally used as support to investigate planning and decision making questions, but knowledge process is often limited by the lack of users’ ability in reading output data. Thus, the improvement of information sharing among many users is one of main tasks of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This is commonly achieved through the use of visual tools which allow users to understand data through intuitive perception. For this reason, the ongoing research described in this paper is investigating a modelling system to combine visual tools with GIS technologies, in order to create a shared common language which could be able to really support wide area Planning processes.