Developing Rural Communities with Vision

CommunityViz is a GIS-based software program for community planning developed in partnership with the Vermont- and Colorado-based Orton Family Foundation.  The Foundation was established to help rural communities with scarce planning resources cope with the challenges faced by development.   

The program has a number of applications for planners and citizens to envision how hypothetical growth scenarios could look. In the five years since development began, CommunityViz has aided in a diverse range of applications from park site selection to dam removals. Users can adjust and weight community preference indicators and may view results in several different formats including cartographic maps or navigable 3D renderings of future growth.

Comments

[Eric]

The people at CommunityViz are very nice, and the software is impressive in many aspects. However, I perosnally did not find it that useful. I did not use it to perform as much number crunching as perhaps I should have to give it a fair evaluation, but I felt that the ModelBuilder 3D was cumbersome to work with considering the "game-like" output. Plus the software is a little bit expensive for rural communities to purchase, considering you would also have to purchase GIS software to serve as its interface. This is a rough estimate, but I would imagine to purchase this software and the GIS software to go along with it, you would be somewhere in the $10,000-15,000 range. I cannot imagine a rural community's city council enthusiastically approving that budget, especially considering they might have to hire a specialist to run it!