Incorporating ecosystem services into an urban scenario planning package

Background/Question/Methods

Smart Growth refers to an array of urban design practices aimed at reducing the ecological footprint of urban areas through emphasizing infill development and higher population densities while minimizing car travel and energy and resource consumption. Urban planners wishing to implement smart growth initiatives are increasingly using scenario planning to compare the future impacts of alternative growth strategies. The marriage of ecosystem services and smart growth scenario planning is an obvious and important step to maximize resource efficiencies and conserve natural resources and habitats. However, adding ecosystem services considerations to the already complex undertaking of creating multiple detailed scenarios is a daunting task to the urban planner. The challenge is intensified by the fact that scenarios are by their very nature futuristic, thus requiring abstraction from existing conditions.

Results/Conclusions

Working within the framework of Envision Tomorrow, an existing scenario- planning tool, we are creating template “green” building blocks that represent ecological landscape features (conserved, restored or constructed) and can be calibrated using local data and inserted into development scenarios. These green blocks are hierarchically equivalent to prototype buildings, which are the basic unit of modeling in Envision Tomorrow. Like prototype buildings, each green block has a suite of quantitative characteristics that allows its contribution to the overall cost-benefit scenario to be evaluated. I will present example green blocks, within the context of a real world scenario. The resulting package is an off-the-shelf tool that allows planners anywhere, on limited budgets, to create and implement ecologically informed planning strategies.