Between the Poles

Infrastructure excellence competition

Infrastructure-excellence.com is hosting the second annual competition showcasing Excellence in Infrastructure— highlighting the best projects done in 2012/2013. The winners will be given over US$10,000 in prizes by the competition sponsors.  The competition is open to anyone 21 years and older who is planning, designing, building, and managing infrastructure projects.  Project types may include the following:

• Transportation (roads and highways, rail, airports, or bridges)
• Land development (commercial sites, subdivisions, public parks, or recreation)
• Water (distribution, water resources, dams and levees, or wastewater)
• Energy (electric and gas distribution, electric transmission, and substation design)
• Urban planning

Geodesign Summit: A new innovative planning protocol that incentivizes conservation

Al Reynolds presented a new and innovative schme for Rural Land Stewardship (RLS) that challenges the traditional paradigms of regulation (e.g. zoning) or land acquisition (e.g. Nature Conservancy) by incentivizing the protection of the habitat without public funding or regulation.  Rural land stewardship is a private/public process based on scientific data and market-driven incentivization.

The area where this has been applied is in southwest Florida on the edge of the western Everglades.  It is 300 sq miles of primarily agricultural land and is home to some of the few remaining Florida panthers as well as other endangered species.

The Florida 2060 project aimed at painting a picture of what Florida is expected to look like in 2060 given current trends.  This particular part of Florida was projected to be overrun by urban sprawl - almost 70% of the study area is projected to have been developed by 2060.

• 135 000 acres - Developed lands
• 16 000 acres - Public land
• 44 000 acres - Agricultural/natural lands

Rural Land Stewardship

The currency in this program is a stewardship credit.  It's calculated using a multi-layered suitability analysis.  It is based on a Natural resource index system which gives a higher score for land that is ecologically good for endangered species.

In the past land that hosted endangered species was not considered to be finacially as valuable as much as land that did not host endangered species, because of the risk of regualtion. The Rural Land Stewardship program reverses this.  Land is more valuable if it hosts or provides good habitat for endangered species.  Endangered species become an asset instead of a liability.

Al described an example, the new town of Ave Maria, home to 5 000 people.  The town was deveeloped under the Rural Land Stewardship program and is 1/10 the size that a town with a similar population would have had if developed under a tradtional development paradigm.  

• 45 000 acres - SRA development
• 16 000 acres - Public land
• 40 000 acres - Agriculture preservation
• 94 000 acres - Natural resource conservation

In additon to reducing urban sprawl the RLS program protected several panther corridors.  And what absolutely distinguishes the development of Ave Maria is that the process managed to keep both developers and environmentalists happy.

One of the key enablers is the availability of geospatial data.  In fact Al said that there was a proverbial firehose of data and the real problem was data management and the analytics required to make sense of the data and provide actionable information. 

Transparency for all stakeholders into the process of analyzing the data and computing the indexes which determine the value of land (in stwewardship credits) is essential in developing trust among all stakeholders.

Based on his experience in this bit of Florida Al argued that traditional zoning doesn't make sense in the modern world.  We need to replace regulatory regimes like zoning with processes like the Rural Land Stewardship program that are based on scientific data.

Geodesign Summit: What is geodesign and why geodesign ?

For over half the nearly 300 people in the audience at the fourth Geodesign Summit in Redlands this was their first Summit.  So there was a serious effort by several speakers including the MC Tom Fisher to define what geodesign is. 

Geodesign is an invented word,  The first use of the word has been traced to 1993, and picked up by ESRI in 2005.   Some of the definitions of the term that I heard at the conference include

Geodesign is a method which tightly couples the creating of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts and systems thinking and (normally) supported by digital technology. Mike Flaxman, amended by Steve Ervin

Geodesign makes design decisions data rich.

Geodesign takes GIS analysis into the future.

Geodesign is design in a geographic space.  Bill Miller

Geodesign is a vision for using geographic knowledge to actively and thoughtfully design.  Jack Dangermond

Perhaps the most concise and the most comprehensive are from Carl Steinitz

Geodesign changes geography by design.

It is clear that for serious societal and environmental issues, designing for change cannot be a solitary activity.  Rather, it is inevitably a collaborative endeavor, wth participants from various design professions and geographic sciences, linked by technology from several locations for rapid communication and feedback, and  reliant on transparent communication with the people of the place who are also direct participants.

To understand what geodesign means in practice, the best way is to look at specific projects.  At the conference there were a number of interesting  presentations about diverse projects all of which reference geodesign and which provide examples of what people mean by geodesign in practice.  I plan to blog about several of these.

Why geodesign ?

A common theme in a number of speakers' presentations is that the effects of population growth, urbanization and climate change have reached the point where we urgently need a serious change, this change will require new tools, and geodesign could be one of them.

For example, Tom Fisher offered some pretty frightening statistics which are not hard to find these days.  There was a pervasive sense at the conference that the planet is on the brink and we have to change.  And if we don't change, the implications will be dire.  Bran Ferren put it this way (paraphrased) - this is that moment in the history of the US and of the world when we need to have a new and unfashionable conversation, a long term conversation on a complex topic where there are no simple, short answers.  David Bartlett (IBM Smarter Planet) was more specific.  "It is clear that there is an immediate requirement to significantly and urgently change the way our built environment is managed."

Ordnance Survey forms OS International to offer national mapping assistance internationally

In the UK the 1790's were responsible for two major advances, the elimination of scurvey in the Royal Navy through the issuance of limes, and the creation of the Ordnance Survey tasked with identifying sites for artillery placement along the English seacoast.  Both contributed to preventing an invasion of the UK by Napoleon.  Interestingly at roughly the same time a survey was being carried out in France from South to North to measure the meter, then defined as one ten millionth of a quarter of the Earth's circumference.  If Napoleon had invaded Britain, it is interesting to speculate that Imperial units would have been replaced by SI in the early 19th C which might have avoided the units debates in modern times.

Since then as the world's first national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey (OS) has been a model for other government mapping agencies around the world.  The OS has just announced the formation of an international service, Ordnance Survey International, to provide specialist services to other national mapping agencies.  It is estimated that location-based data contributes more than £100 billion to the UK economy.  Ordnance Survey International will start in September 2012 and will be headed by Steven Ramage, former Executive Director at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)..  Carsten Roensdorf, currently with the OS in Southampton, will also be joining OS International and will be located in the Middle East.  I've known both Steven and Carsten for many years.   This is an outstanding team that will add a lot of value to national mapping internationally at a critical time when many of these organizations are experiencing rapid and dramatic changes.

Geospatial World Forum: Dutch 3D standard integrates CityGML/GeoBIM and large scale geography

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Jantien Stoter of the Delft Univeristy of Technology and an advisor to Geonovum, gave an overview of the ongoing work on the Dutch 3D standard, which is being piloted by about 100 organizations in the Netherlands.  Geonovum is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) executive committee in the Netherlands. Its goal is to provide better access to geo-information in the public sector and is responisble for developing and maintaining the standards for geospatial information that are necessary to achieve this goal.

The Dutch 3D standard integrates CityGML and the Dutch IMGeo standard. 

• CityGML is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard for 3D information (geometry and semantics) about cities, external to buildings. GeoBIM is a CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE) intended to extend CityGML to include detailed, semantic information about the inside of buildings.  GeoBIM was initiated in 2009. The last official update was completed in 2010.
• IMGeo is the Dutch standard for the exchange of large scale geography such as roads, tunnels, water bodies, land use, and so on.  IMGeo is intended to be a scale-independent object model providing a uniform nationwide coverage.  IMGeo 2.0 contains a mandatory part, the Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie (BGT). which has legal status in the Netherlands, plus additonal data. IMGeo is 2D, but is extensible to 2.5D and ultimately to 3D.  Like CityGML, IMGeo recognizes levels of detail (LOD).

There are six work groups involved in the Dutch 3D standard effort. For example, one is responsible for compiling killer applications using the 3D standard.

Relationship to IFC

One of the work groups could have broad implications, potentially beyond the borders of the Netherlands, This work group is responsible for aligning the CityGML ADE GeoBIM standard and the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) BIM standard maintained by BuildingSmart.  IFC is intended to enable the exchange of BIM data between applications developed by different software vendors in a vendor-neutral way.  The objective of the work group is to define a standard, semantically meaningful mapping between IFC and GeoBIM.

Geospatial World Forum: Land administration in Germany to include 3D cadastre by 2013

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Peter Creuzer, Director State Survey of Lower Saxony, gave a very interesting introduction to land management in Germany and some of the things that are on the horizon. 

Germany has about 82 million citizens, or about 229 people per km², and the population has been declining since 2003. It has about 64.5 million parcels (land properties) valued at about €9 trillion.  About 48% of households own land.  The land administration system handles about a million transactions per year. 

Germany has the same problem that other jurisdictions have, urbanization, but it has limited land resources.  It loses about 77 hectares/day to urban sprawl.

Land administration in Germany is comprised of two parts, a land register and the cadastre.The land register includes information about owners, land use, encumbrances, and other legal obligations.  The cadastre includes the land parcel geometry, owneship, buildings and public restrictions.  The objectives of the land administration system are security of tenure, some revenue for the government, and support for a transparent planning process.

There are some interesting future goals, one of the most important of which is enabling sustainable development.  This includes land consolidation and revitalization of older cities.

Another major initiative is revision of the land taxation system which is expected to be completed by 2014.  The alternatives that are being considered are taxation based on market value (which is what is used in Ontario), a fixed tax, and a combined system.

There is also a new data model underway based on ISO and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards referred to by the abbreviation AAA, which stands for AFIS (uniform geodetic reference), ALKIS (uniform cadastre), and ATKIS (uniform topography).  By 2013 the data model will include support for a 3D cadastre and will include the CityGML standard.  It will be accessible via OGC web services; WMS, WFS, and others.

Germany is also working on being compliant with the EU INSPIRE directive.  There is a pilot in progess involving the Netherlands, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine Westphalia.

Geospatial World Forum: Creating a land registry system in Rwanda in less than five years

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam today Didier Sagashya, Deputy Director General of Lands and Mapping Department in the government of Rwanda gave a fascinating presentation about creating a land adminstration system in Rwanda.

The Organic Law of 2005 defined a new land tenure system based on security of tenure and that land administration is mandatory. There are an estimated 10 million parcels in Rwanda which has one of the highest national population densities in the world, about 400 people per km². 

Starting in 2009 Rwanda set out to create a land registry.  One of the  most interesting aspects of the Rwandan approach is that it is not based on a traditionally-surveyed cadastre.  Instead it relies on nation-wide high resolution (25 cm) photo imagery and a process that involves consulting with local people and drawing boundaries on the high resolution imagery.  At this point about 2.7 million parcels have been defined and adjudicated and land registry titles printed.  It is expected that registration of all of the 10 million parcels will be completed by 2013, which is a remarkable achievement, especially in less than five years.

The major benefit of a national land registry system is that it enables land to participate in the national economy.  For example, land can be used as collateral in applying for bank loans.  One of the interesting statistics that Didier mentioned was that last year the number of bank loan applications involving land as a collateral was about 10,000 for the entire year.  In the first quarter of 1012, the number of bank loan applications is already 6000, which suggest people are already beginning to take advantage of the new land registry system.

The other major impact that Didier mentioned that a national land registry system can have is that it can lead to sustainable land management, less erosion, for example, because presumeably if you own something you take better care of it.  This effect tends to be long-term, and Didier did not have statistics to show that this is happening, but this is one of the outcomes they are monitoring, in addition to bank loans.