An open source approach to urban planning

Excerpted from a report by Wired, which goes into the details of its development and profiles the maker.

Eliot Van Buskirk:

Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable.

You might call it a “P2P-to-people” initiative — these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That’s not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton’s vision for livable cities.

The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he’s lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton’s open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

“99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym,” Wright says. “Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards… [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field.”

Portland, Oregon has already used his open-source software to plan its bus routes. San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment.”

The article also mentions Mark’s involvement with the Living Cities Movement:

“He funds two social websites: Streetsblog.org, which employs seven full-time reporters and editors who cover “the livable streets movement” and Streetfilms.org, for which a three-person film crew chronicles innovative traffic solutions from around the world. A typical story on the new San Francisco version of Streetsblog concerns the potential destruction of the bike lane on Octavia.”