Redeveloping the greyfields with ENVISION: using participatory support systems to reduce urban sprawl in Australia

Given the recent publications from Australian State governments demanding greater community and stakeholder engagement in urban planning, as well as calls from international agencies for a reduction in the footprint, and increase in the sustainable planning, of cities, there is now the potential for the advances made in geo-tools to have considerable effect. Arising out of 'Greening the Greyfields', a federally funded, inter-state project examining the feasibility of redevelopment in the middle suburbs, ENVISION was produced as a GIS-based, Participatory Support System, for engaging with the diverse array of stakeholders involved in urban redevelopment. This system was designed to bring wide-ranging land, demographic and market data together to highlight the redevelopment options, and identify potential redevelopment precincts, across metropolitan centres, with the aim of initiating debate between those involved on how best to manage urban growth. The result of this project has seen ENVISION being used at a state and municipal level, where workshops based on its use have begun to highlight the barriers to redevelopment as well as the ways forward for more sustainable redevelopment in the urban Greyfields (middle suburbs with high levels of un-planned redevelopment, high incidences of culturally and technologically obsolete dwellings, on land that is highly undercapitalised). Based on the communicative and deliberative models of community engagement, ENVISION has shown that geo-tools can have considerable affect in the mutual education of stakeholders, in extracting the pertinent issues and potential barriers to redevelopment, and in encouraging groups of experts to produce novel solutions to 'wicked' problems that they could not, without the collaboration that the tool demands, resolve on their own. Ultimately this project highlights the ability of GIS to not only provide an interface to real-time data manipulation, but its power to be used as a tool for communicative education between the diverse perspectives within a politically, technologically, financially and culturally sensitive area.