NH51B-1880
Visionmaker NYC: A bottom-up approach to finding shared socioeconomic pathways in New York City
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Eric Wayne Sanderson1,2, Kim Fisher3, Mario Giampieri3, Jason Barr4, Marci Meixler5, Shorna Broussard Allred6, Katherine E. Bunting-Howarth7 and Bryce DuBois8, (1)Organization Not Listed, Washington, DC, United States, (2)Columbia University of New York, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, New York, NY, United States, (3)Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY, United States, (4)Rutgers University Newark, Economics, Newark, NJ, United States, (5)Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick, NJ, United States, (6)Cornell University, Department of Natural Resources, Ithaca, NY, United States, (7)Cornell University, Cooperative Extension and New York Sea Grant, Ithaca, NY, United States, (8)CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, United States
Abstract:
Visionmaker NYC is a free, public participatory, bottom-up web application to develop and share climate mitigation and adaptation strategies for New York City neighborhoods. The goal is to develop shared socioeconomic pathways by allowing a broad swath of community members – from schoolchildren to architects and developers to the general public – to input their concepts for a desired future. Visions are comprised of climate scenarios, lifestyle choices, and ecosystem arrangements, where ecosystems are broadly defined to include built ecosystems (e.g. apartment buildings, single family homes, etc.), transportation infrastructure (e.g. highways, connector roads, sidewalks), and natural land cover types (e.g. wetlands, forests, estuary.) Metrics of water flows, carbon cycling, biodiversity patterns, and population are estimated for the user’s vision, for the same neighborhood today, and for that neighborhood as it existed in the pre-development state, based on the Welikia Project (welikia.org.) Users can keep visions private, share them with self-defined groups of other users, or distribute them publicly. Users can also propose “challenges” – specific desired states of metrics for specific parts of the city – and others can post visions in response. Visionmaker contributes by combining scenario planning, scientific modelling, and social media to create new, wide-open possibilities for discussion, collaboration, and imagination regarding future, shared socioeconomic pathways.
