Enabling citizens and planners to interactively create growth scenarios is the focus of a new INDEX planning tool, Paint the Region 3D. Designed to support land-use and transportation scenario building, the new tool combines 3D visualization with the ‘digital charrette' and indicator feedback power of INDEX. It was recently launched in a demonstration sponsored by the Florida Department of Community Affairs as part of the state's new legislative incentives for growth visioning.

Digital charrette participants use the software to "paint" growth on local geography, choosing from a palette of rural-to-urban land-use types. Users click on locations where development is desired and the tool adds the corresponding amount of population and employment growth in 3D extrusions. This is repeated until a growth forecast has been fully allocated, while participants get feedback during the painting with indicators that measure land-use, transportation, and environmental outcomes. Multiple scenarios are ranked according to user-defined objectives.

Members of Florida's Sustainable Treasure Coast Committee applied Paint the Region 3D in a July workshop sponsored by the state's Department of Community Affairs (DCA). DCA is implementing Florida Senate Bill 360's visioning guidelines, including promotion of information technology like INDEX that facilitates public participation in community and regional planning. DCA will summarize the Treasure Coast demonstration along with other tools at the Florida APA Chapter's annual conference in St. Petersburg on September 9, 2005 (www.floridaplanning.org).

Also in Florida, INDEX PlanBuilder has been selected by the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council to support Development of Regional Impact (DRI) charretting on August 26 for the 6,000-acre Green Island project in Osceola County near Orlando. Representatives of state, regional, and local agencies will use PlanBuilder to conceptualize alternative development scenarios as part of the region's DRI review process.

INDEX is a suite of interactive GIS tools that operate as extensions of ESRI's ArcMap and ArcScene, or as ArcIMS applications. Introduced in 1994 by Criterion Planners of Portland, Oregon, INDEX has become the most widely-used planning support tool in the U.S., with over 100 organizations in 35 states equipped with the software.

Related Link: INDEX Planning Support Software

For more information contact:

Eliot Allen
Criterion Planners
725 NW Flanders St, Suite 303
Portland
OR 97209
US

Phone: 503 224 8606
Fax: 503 224 8702
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.crit.com