Emerging user needs in urban planning

This chapter provides geomodelers with some basic concepts used in spatial and urban planning and discusses the information needs in this particular domain. Urban planners ultimately support political decision making, which serves the public according to the government’s political value system. The concept of resilience is an appropriate framework for urban planning; it stimulates the development of long-term sustainability strategies that are capable of dealing with a changing living environment and the associated risks and pressures. The three main challenges affecting the use of 3-D subsurface models in support of urban planning and urban development projects are: ubiquitous presence of artificially modified ground; the scale and density of the required information; and the communication and sharing of information. The successful use of a geological model must support multiple scenarios, honor considerations outside the geoscience domain, and pay special attention to model visualizations that are understandable to non-geoscience experts.