Before we can begin to design anything, we have to understand the idea of context. The landscape, people, spaces, time, and processes are all a part of the context that describes a place. Much of this lesson's work revolves around trying to understand where to draw invisible boundary lines around a study area and what technical experts or skill sets are needed within the geodesign team to fully understand and describe a place.
For example, imagine that two places are faced with the challenge of designing a system to deal with excess water after a rainstorm (storm water). The first place is a highly urbanized area, such as Beijing, China. The second is a small town, in a mostly rural area. How you might describe the two places would be different, and how you might approach solving the problem of stormwater management would also be quite different. Beijing may have strong leadership and healthy funding to implement a storm water solution, but it lacks undeveloped natural land. Our small town has ample natural lands that are amenable to absorbing stormwater, but lacks the financial support to implement a solution. Therefore, both Beijing and the small town will need to develop solutions unique to each’s context.
Context is largely defined by scale , or the level of detail used to describe a place. The scale of a place can range from very broad (the Earth) or very fine (your backyard). Generally the scale of a place is described within the range of global, regional, and local with various sub-classifications such as counties, cities, streets, properties, etc. As we saw in our stormwater example, the detail, characteristics, methods, and possibilities of a problem will vary with the scale that we choose to describe a place. The issue of detail is what largely determines what and how a place can be practically described, or whether we are able to employ local knowledge or science in our description. Fine-scale problems can be described in great detail and with excellent accuracy, whereas as problems occuring at a broader scale may need to be described more generally or abstractly.
If you wanted to understand the amount of traffic on a single street, you could go outside and count the number of cars that pass and be comfortably certain how busy that specific street was on that specific day. This is knowledge. As we saw last lesson, local people can be invaluable in providing local knowledge. On the other hand, if you want to understand the amount of traffic in North America you would need to approach to question differently. It is impractical to count every car on every street throughout the continent (although new data gathering methods are rapidly making this a more practical approach). Instead you might apply a science, such as statistics, to gain an understanding of how a large area is performing based on a relatively small amount of data. Here we see the fundamental difference between fine and broad-scale problems - discreet knowledge versus applied science.
Would you rather improve the traffic for your street or all of North America? Applying science to a broad scale implies that the problem is too complex to be fully known (a lack of knowledge) and that we are accepting a certain amount of risk in our abstract description. From a purely risk assessment perspective, it would seem that it is better to guide a design problem towards a finer scale that will give the geodesign team more localized and detailed information with which to work. But with a shrinking scale, the ability to creatively affect change is reduced, thereby diminishing the goal and impact of design.
A key step in the geodesign process is to determine what scale is appropriate to gather the necessary data and be able to successfully implement the design strategy . Geodesign is an iterative process, and changing scale is common in both the generation of multiple strategies and as a response to stakeholder feedback.
Deciding what scale to work at in a Geodesign study is often the most challenging and critical part of the process. Douglas Olson, a Geodesign practitioner and president of O2 Planning + Design Inc. in Calgary, Alberta sums up the issue of scale determination as "The Goldilocks Determination": What's the appropriate amount of detail, and at what scale? Does a problem need to be considered at multiple scales? Watch as he describes it in his own words. Dr. Olson discusses scale in the context of the 2013 Calgary Flood from about 3:22 to 10:00, but you are welcome to watch the entire video (30:57) if you wish.
Video Transcript