• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

Deborah Murphy, owner of Deborah Murphy Urban Design and Planning, spoke Friday at an event in Pe

As the second-most populated city in the United States, with 3.5 million people and an expected 50,000 more each year, Los Angeles faces complex challenges in its quest for a sustainable future.

From environmental issues to affordable housing, urban thinkers from a variety of disciplines gathered on Oct. 6 in Perloff Hall to begin searching for answers and innovative ideas for Los Angeles’ unforeseeable future.

Hosted by the Department of Urban Planning in the School of Public Policy and Social Research, the conference not only offered audience members the opportunity to engage in debate with the various guests, but also served as a fundraiser for providing urban planning students scholarships.

Issues at the core of urban living include transportation, protecting the environment, accommodating new immigrants, and offering affordable housing, said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning.

The concept of sustainability – ensuring the continuity of economic, social and environmental elements of society for the present as well as the future – has generated discussion about a number of different approaches to tackling the uncertainties of city planning.

Friday’s conference suggested an alternative methodology for attacking such challenges by proposing a new kind of decision-making model.

Steve Bankes, chief technology officer for Evolving Logic Inc. and professor of information science at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, introduced the Computer Assisted Reasoning System software, which utilizes computational experimentation to more accurately reason about a variety of uncertain situations, such as city planning.

Bankes is the main designer for a software which allows computers to generate plausible situations based on the user’s input, and consequently enables the user to formulate and compare effective policies according to these scenarios.

Straying away from a more standard approach in which policy makers “predict and then act,” computer models, Bankes said, provide officials with a wide range of scenarios to consider when planning for a growing region.

“We want to see the future very broadly so we can navigate the best we can,” Bankes said, adding that “robust” policy making is the key element in this new approach. “Our goal is to look for policies that will preform satisfactorily.”

The methodology, which relies on advanced computer software, aims at capturing a variety of situations that could be true and allows users to see what things need to be done so that various futures can be accounted for.

In addition, the process results in strategies that are not only optimal for likely scenarios, but is rather “robust” across a wide range of scenarios, Bankes said.

Providing the context for implementing this new technology, S. Gail Goldberg, planning director for the city of Los Angeles, assessed L.A.’s current situation in regional planning and introduced the city planning committee’s new initiatives.

“There is planning (in L.A.), but no coordination – that has been a great cost to this city,” Goldberg said.

In addition to strengthening coordination, Goldberg added that L.A.’s tendency for “planning project by project” needs to change as well in order to encompass long-term benefits and consequences.

Among the planning department’s initiatives, Goldberg stressed the need to engage the public in the planning process.

“It (should be) a part of everyone’s daily work,” she said in her speech, adding that community involvement will help generate a necessary public dialogue around planning.