Dangermond, president of Esri, addressed urban planners from across the United States gathered in Redlands on Wednesday for the tech company’s annual Geodesign Summit.
The summit is based on the premise that “planning practices rooted in the twentieth century may no longer be adequate” to build smart, liveable communities.
Attendees looked at ways cities such as built-out San Francisco are using Esri technology to find room for growth and Los Angeles County assesses need for parks.
Esri is a geographic information systems company whose cloud-based platform, ArcGIS, combines maps and data for analysis. The proliferation of big data, computers and social media is turning GIS into what Dangermond called “a system of systems.”
“We’ll have all the data we need. We’ll have all the computer power we need, we’ll have all the big data computing power. We’ll have advanced visualizations. We’ll have the reach to every citizen on the planet. All of that is converging into this thing, the platform that we call GIS. And it’s happening everywhere.”
Dangermond was speaking a day after returning from a trip to India, where he said even villagers are more engaged with digital technology than many Americans.
The Inland Empire has been identified as a place in danger of being left behind by the digital revolution because many of its residents lack access to broadband.
Dangermond envisioned cities, counties, states the federal government and private initiatives sharing data.
“I think it will just take off and grow like the Internet did.”
Pointing to a visual aid projected on the wall behind him, he added, “Along the bottom of the slide here I said this is going to create a nervous system for the planet. It’s a little presumptuous, but it sounds good.”
©2017 The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
