Back in December, some planning tech enthusiasts got together to sketch out some common planning processes, and ways that technology might improve those processes. One of the goals of the evening was to translate the sketched diagrams into useful data for future use, ideally in online diagrammed forms.
My group focused on land use data, this is a belated summary of our enjoyable and productive discussion. As the photos of the diagrams show, they weren’t particularly linear, flow-chart like or mind mappable, so rather than try to squeeze them into these formats I’ve written some detailed notes below, also available on Google Docs.
Next steps? Definitely need to define the problems of the petri dish model more clearly - and like transit data, there’s a big opportunity for a positive message around greater sharing of use data. OSM shows the way, how far away can a comprehensive, crowd sourced land use layer be?
The petri-dish model of land use data (a.k.a. the problem)

What is land use data?
- description of uses on the ground, what specifically happens on this piece of land
Data is out there…
- small fragments of data
- lots of gaps
- proprietary information that most people can’t access
- each user only sees a small part of the overall picture
People need data to
- make accurate assessments of the situation for better planning
- base goals in reality (e.g. models of carbon emissions, vmt)
- plan for suitable development
- explain the big picture
- informal uses
But the map data have lots of problems
- neighborhood maps
- names all wrong
- data availability
- can’t get it
- up to date?
- no, often out of data
- created for a specific need
- not re-shared for other uses
- leads to repeat work
- data quality
- not useful for what other people want to do
- no incentive to share
- why should anyone share data, no benefits
- licenses
- even if you get data, can’t work with it
- can’t share with others
- problems with creating derivative products
The ecosystem model of land use data (a.k.a. the solution)
Rather than depending on the closed systems and limited access of the petri dish model, the land use ecosystem thrives on easy exchanges of information.
Land use data moves easily between different participants - local governments, planners, private sector, non-profits, individuals. Money is saved by removing the barriers to access, and the open sourcing of data collection reduces the burden of updating data on any individual organization.
Data are unencumbered by restrictive licenses, and exchange is governed by open protocols: standard for the data formats themselves, but more importantly for the types of information shared and how updates are passed and incorporated. Individual parcels can be updated in a wiki-esque, flickr-esque format, where changes can be added and are inspected and endorsed by other participants in the ecosystem.
Where once was discord and bad data, the ecosystem brings sharing and better data. Rather than each data user seeing a small piece of the overall data puzzle, the ecosystem model requires and lives on openness and collaboration.
p.s.
A great high wall there, it tried to stop me
A great big sign there, said ‘private property’
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.
– Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land.









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