CITYVIZ - A PROJECT OF THE TUCSON COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION NETWORK (TCTEN)

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1 Robert MacArthur College of Agriculture University of Arizona Tucson, AZ , , Steve Whitney Pima County Department of Transportation 201 N. Stone Tucson, AZ, , , Donald Ijams Tucson Police Department 270 S. Stone Tucson, AZ, , Ex. 1371, CITYVIZ - A PROJECT OF THE TUCSON COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION NETWORK (TCTEN) Abstract: The Tucson CityViz project Increasingly, neighborhood associations, community organizations, K12, and informal educational programs are becoming aware of the value of public data, but the expanded use of this data by the non-technical is still a challenge. CityViz is a Tucson, Arizona community project designed to overcome some of these obstacles. What CityVIZ will do is make this data more useable in practical, real-world applications with direct impact on neighborhoods. The data will be worked into specific modules, make heavy use of GIS and visualization, let users input the data they are most interested in and run models with practical outcomes. For example, a neighborhood group, or an after school program might decide to beautify a certain street with more trees. They will collect digital photos to build visualizations of the street, pull images of those trees from a university database and view them in the visualization, run the proposed plantings through GIS-based models that will disclose information about the effect the trees will have on shade, temperature, carbon dioxide, etc, and then secure the trees from one of the participating groups - Tucson Clean and Beautiful - and plant them. Meanwhile, there is data that can be pulled off of various parts of this application that can be fed into aggregated city models. CityViz relies on several centers equipped with high speed Internet access, which are wired to data resources in the City of Tucson, Pima County and the University of Arizona. There is also a mobile center under development, a bus equipped with computer stations that will link to data and applications via a wireless connection. Data in Pima County is heavily developed for GIS, and much of it is already available for on-line use (see

2 1. BACKGROUND The CityViz project has morphed into the Community Technology Education (CTE) project (see and will soon become the Tucson Community Technology Education Network (TCTEN). The initial effort behind all of these instantiations grew out of a GIS cooperative between various agencies in the city and county government to share GIS data. TCTEN's role is to get this data to the public, but since that beginning, it has become much more. Dozens of community organizations, education institutions and member of the local government now share their thoughts at monthly meetings, and the project has become more one of technology education in general, with youth, neighborhoods and adult education as targeted populations. There is an emphasis on reaching low-income neighborhoods, at-risk youth, and small businesses. CityViz/CTE/TCTEN home page These populations are normally lacking both equipment and technical skills. TCTEN is providing access through the participating centers in the program. To make technology education more understandable TCTEN is developing a curriculum based on a multimedia curriculum developed at the Tucson Pima Arts Council, one of the TCTEN partners. This curriculum is enhanced with local data available through Pima County, the City of Tucson and the University of Arizona. The modules of the curriculum result in some useful, real-world products for the participants - a neighborhood plan, class credits for a youth at their school, or a Web page for a small business person, for example. To make the learning of these complex skills more palatable to the non-technical, the curriculum is heavily infused with GIS and visualization, hence the name CityViz.

3 Portal to Pima County Data 2. CONTEXT As the title suggests, a recent publication by the French urban planner, Robert Laurini, Information Systems for Urban Planning: A Hypermedia Co-OperativeApproach, multimedia and the Web are good vehicles for getting citizens to first access public data and then to work cooperatively with it. Luarini thinks this increased access will increase public involvement and is a planner's best ally to get support for projects and spending (Laurini, 2001). TCTEN is using an approach similar to the one Laurini suggests. Here is a typical learning example from the TCTEN curriculum: youths working in the public arts module are partnered with members of a neighborhood organization who are interested in a beautification project for a certain street. They take photos of the street with digital cameras to create panoramas. They take GPS receivers with them when they take the photos, so they can collect other attribute information about the street and tie it to a GIS. They use lasers to collect building elevations so they can build 3D visualizations of the street, using DTMs and orthophotos from the County database. Next they get on line to a University database and retrieve plant imagery and data for several possible trees that could go on that street. They are able to insert the imagery into a visualization to give a realistic impression of how the street will look after the project. They can also run a model that will do a cost-benefit analysis of how the tree will affect the neighborhood - cost of watering versus cooling of the street, absorption of carbon monoxide, etc. The students present their findings to the neighborhood group in "portfolio" style. Other urban planning and landscape architecture professionals may be present at the presentation. The neighborhood group approves and the tree is secured from Trees for Tucson, part of the Tucson Clean and Beautiful program, a TCTEN partner. The students receive credits from their high schools, and skills that will be useful in course at Pima Community College or the University of Arizona. City of Tucson planners are able to aggregate the findings of the neighborhood model into bigger models.

4 Neighborhood panoramas Map server with point data for visualizations

5 City Green model - mapping neighborhood assets to feed into a cost benefit model 3. THE ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY LEARNING APPLICATION TCTEN technology education applications are built around several elements that are intended to make them successful and sustainable. The above example touches on most of them: a. Collaborations among different neighborhood stakeholders; in the project youths worked with a neighborhood organization, and with community professionals. Kretzmann and Mcknight (1993) have written about how important it is for neighborhoods to become less dependent on external help and to help mobilize their talents and resources to help themselves. b. Peer-to-peer application: along those same lines, it is beneficial to have users collect their own data, rather than just depend on public data distributed from archives. In this example, the youths collected GPS, attribute and elevation data on their own. The field data can be used to calibrate or correct the archival data. These peer or P2P applications are also appealing to youth, who have grown up using Napster and Amazon (Oram). c. Real world applications: the example used real world, local data with relevance and meaning to the participants. This practice goes a long way toward curing the abstraction of scripted tutorials using prescribed data sets from unfamiliar communities and concerns. d. Rewards: the participants also got real world products from this application. The youths received some skills, learned how to work on a project with a portfolio presentation (which can engender more pride), learned group decision making and critical thinking skills, and also received some education credits. The neighborhood got a beautification plan. The city got data. e. Complex technology education enhanced through use of visual tools: GIS and visualization were used to mask the learning of some complex technical skills. The collaborators used maps, photography, and 3Ds to communicate with each other - much easier than using tables and numbers and trying to envision everything in their

6 heads. They also ended with products that can be easily understood at public hearings. Here is another example that also takes advantage of these principles, this time for a small business. In this example, a business wants to create a profile of nearby businesses and residents, so they can price their product, pizza for example, accordingly, and direct market to certain households. The business person learns how to get on line, pull down neighborhood data and run a buffer application that will return demographics for all the parcels within the area they designate. Again, this application is user driven, takes advantage of real-world local data, and has a reward. User buffers around a designated point and gets back parcel data:

7 4. RESOURCES TCTEN has marshaled over 30 different agencies, organizations and educational institutions to its cause. Six different technology centers supporting over 100 computers are available, all with Internet access. These centers are available after school, evenings, and on weekends. They cater to the targeted audiences. TCTEN expects to matriculate participants this year, and place 10 to 20 interns in various classrooms and businesses. TCTEN has applied for funding at various agencies, and recently gave presentations to the Tucson City Council and to the Greater Tucson Strategic Partnership for Economic Development, who have pledged support for the project. 5. CONCLUSIONS TCTEN's goal is to find more useful and effective ways to transfer technology education to the public, and to promote more use of the huge archives of public data that go largely unused except by urban professionals. This method, of infusing a technology curriculum with real world data and applications, benefits multiple parties. By building support for these applications from several agencies and organizations, TCTEN hopes to build sustainability into its program, and become a model for other communities. REFERENCES Kretzmann, John and McKnight, John, Evanston, Illinois, 1993, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University (see for synopsis.) Laurini Robert, 2001, Information Systems for Urban Planning: A Hypermedia Co- OperativeApproach, London, Taylor & Francis. Ed. Oram, Andy, 2001, Peer-to-Peer; Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, Sebastopol, California, O'Reilly.