Changing landscapes with digital tools

By Judy Arginteanu

As codirector of the Center for Changing Landscapes, Mary Vogel is used to building bridges. The center, which she directs with Alan Ek, head of the Department of Forest Resources in the College of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resource Sciences, has an ambitious and far-reaching mandate: combining research across disciplines and integrating design skills, scientific knowledge, and GIS capability;

With those objectives in mind, the Center for Changing Landscapes works with state and community officials and citizens to create useful designs to inform decision making. "The digital tools that have become available in recent years have made that work even more useful," Vogel said.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been a huge boon, particularly because of the cross-scale nature of the center's work, which focuses on the site, district, and region both individually and as a synergistic whole. Even as the center's work seeks to support regional vitality and identity, "the compelling things are at the site scale," she said. By integrating all three scales, decision makers can see those connections and make more powerful, informed decisions.

Another advantage is simply the range of information GIS makes available. Before, getting accurate, up-to-date physical data-- essential to good design decisions--had been problematic. "In the old days," said Vogel, "we were lucky to get a good map from the state highway department."

Now, designers can take all kinds of GIS information and incorporate it so the design grows almost organically from the cultural and natural characteristics of the site. For a community trail network in New Ulm, for instance, designers worked from a framework of the city's physical site on three terraces along the Minnesota River. The trail features different kinds of trees that express the ecology of each terrace environment, as the city rises from the riverbanks to the prairie upland. GIS also revealed three different kinds of stone--Kasota stone, granite, and quartzite--in the river valley, so signature elements for the Minnesota River State Trail were designed to reflect this geology by using the appropriate stone in its naturally occurring area.

And perhaps paradoxically, digital media have allowed more widespread and effective use of drawings, a signature of the center. "Working in this digital age, we can scan and manipulate drawings," Vogel said, to present different design alternatives, without going through the laborious and expensive process of hand drawing the entire image again.

Vogel is using digital methods as an outreach tool for the West Side Circulator Project, an innovative bus service that connects kids and after-school services in the St. Paul neighborhood. The center is using that quintessential digital communication mode--the community organization's blog--to further involve stakeholders. Making information accessible will help link the larger community to the project's community-inspired site designs.