Professional Workshops
During the initial two professional workshops held at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the Ecocity Builders team introduced faculty, local officials, architects, and planners to the ins and outs of creating a dynamic mapping platform that visualizes multiple data types with citizen engagement at its core. In alignment with its EcoCompass Educational Compendium, the team introduced the project’s core concepts, tools and methods underpinning the Urbinsight approach to GeoDesign — a means for planning built and natural environments in an integrated process, including stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation.
Participants utilized data layers from the open source geospatial content management system Geonode through which the information could be assessed in conjunction with citizen-sourced data and high resolution imagery drawn from government data. The workshop used the information in combination with guided tutorials through which participants could set up a case study of their city and neighborhoods, based on UN Sustainable Development Goal 11.
Attendees also learned how local participation can be applied to urban metabolism. Similar to mapping, a standard protocol is adopted and tested in disparate locations. The result is referred to as a Participatory Urban Metabolism Information System (PUMIS), an important tool for communities who seek to become more self-reliant as well as for cities who seek to adopt multi-level, collaborative forms of governance.