Landscape and Purpose: Modeling the human use of space in GIS by Helen Couclelis – Geography Department, University of California

This presentation will address the challenge of developing a GIS data model that can support the analysis, explanation and anticipation of land use structure and change in their special nature as phenomena governed by purposeful human action. Purposeful organization characterizes urban and rural landscapes at all scales, yet GIS is currently ill equipped to help make sense of the inherent logic of the resulting patterns and their functions. Our project draws upon principles from the normative design disciplines and in particular on the notion of an informal or formal, implicit or explicit, past or future-oriented plan as the key to understanding the connections between spatial organization, human activity, function and purpose. In our model the notion of plan is represented in terms of (1) a ‘higher’ context of more general objectives and a ‘lower’ context of sub-goals on a vertical dimension, and (2) sequences of functional precedents and goals on a horizontal dimension. With the help of a couple of examples drawn from actual case studies, we show that this simple model provides a basis for interpreting and anticipating spatial configurations and spatial changes that result from human activity and design at multiple granularities of purpose and space.

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