Drawing Together: Technology Development for Public Service

Involving communities in the design and planning of the environment they live in is critical to creating ethical cities that work to right historical injustices. However, technology is usually not developed with this civic purpose in mind, favoring single author solutions that are not suitable for urban planning. In this chapter, we share our vision of planning technologies built off of collaborative and reparative planning ideals. We present a history of Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), the current state of the art in planning technologies and discuss how its development prevents it from realizing technology’s full potential in planning. We then demonstrate our collaborative planning approach through a case study of our partnership with Green City Force, an AmeriCorps program that works at the intersection of environmental, economic, and racial justice with young adults from the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) communities. In this project, we explore the ways in which we can leverage computing to co-design a large number of network-based urban interventions and to measure the ecological and physical impact of these proposals in the overall urban resilience. This ongoing work demonstrates the viability of a community-driven development process, both in our software infrastructures and in our physical spaces.