Consensus anyone?

Anyone who has ever attended a public meeting knows how long it takes to get a consensus on policy or a development project. The citizenry has as many opinions as hairs on a dog. But what if you could visually represent and manipulate each person's perspective to help make town planning decisions? The Orton Family Foundation, a Vermont-based nonprofit national operating foundation, has developed CommunityViz software, an extension of ESRI's ArcView GIS software that is designed to assist in community planning and design decision making. CommunityViz will be available to the public in September 2000. The Orton Family Foundation's Community Planning and Simulation Project focused its pilot work on rural communities in Colorado and New England, where self-government is a tradition.

With CommunityViz, communities can build an information infrastructure and develop their own digital tools. Each community can use interactive simulation and visualization technologies to adapt to its individual environment.

Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is one of two pilot communities using the beta version of the software. Last June, the Planning Commission requested a FAR (floorto-area ratio) demonstration to determine the size of a house that could be put on a given size lot.

"We simulated a residential block in Steamboat to illustrate moving from a 0.28 ratio (below left) to a 0.45 ratio (below right) with the click of a mouse and the houses increasing or decreasing in...