Planning support: Hardware and software in search of a system

Abstract

Urban planning has adopted a variety of modeling and data manipulation technologies over the last 30 years. Computer products such as traffic modelers, geographic information systems, and multimedia have been brought into planning organisations to perform specific tasks. More recently, the developers of software that support planning have begun to look towards integration of various operations and have begun referring to their products as planning support systems (PSS). In general, however, PSS remain a specific purpose tool, or a set of tools, loosely coupled to provide for a small range of operations. In general there is little system. This paper reviews current trends in spatial hardware ..