From Information to Participation

Book excerpt: If landscape visualizations are applied as tools for participation, they should provide a high level of interactivity to facilitate planning process and outcomes. This book presents evidence for this hypothesis through demonstrative case studies in the Entlebuch UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Switzerland. In collaborative workshops, interactive real-time visualizations were used to respond directly to the dialogue, and long-term climate change impacts were illustrated through collapsing time animations. The author, Dr. Olaf Schroth, is a researcher at the University of British Columbia and has studied both geodesy and planning in Hanover, Hamburg and Newcastle upon Tyne. Since then, he has been working at the interface of planning and 3D visualization, and the book summarizes his work in the EU project VisuLands (2003-2006) and his PhD at ETH Zurich. His research is not technology-driven but rather raises critical issues from a planning perspective. Therefore, the results and hands-on recommendations address researchers as well as practitioners in planning, architecture, geovisualization, geography, cartography and computer visualization.