Contact Us

Lew Hopkins
Department of Urban and Regional Planning
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

L-Hopkins@UIUC.edu

Please contribute!

Visual tools are essential for communicating planning ideas. The Visual Tools for Planners website is a library of examples that practicing planners can imitate for specific applications. The site is equivalent to an edited book by including examples created by and credited to different authors. The initial collection is largely from the work of faculty and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is edited by Lew Hopkins for the Lincoln Institute. The major effort for 2007-2008 will be on attracting and editing contributions from a wider group.

We invite proposed contributions to the site. First, look at the current site to see the general organization of the examples. Then, send a brief email to Lew Hopkins (L-Hopkins@uiuc.edu) identifying the topic and purpose of the visual tools you would like to contribute. You can include a graphic example, but this is not necessary. Lew will respond with specific suggestions on what and how to send electronic files of your contribution.

All contributions must be either free of copyright restrictions or contributors must be authorized and willing to grant a non-exclusive copyright to the Lincoln Institute to post the example on the site. Alternatively, we may be able to create a pointer to another site, but our purpose in not simply to create a directory to other sites.

Contributors will provide an explanation of what the example shows and how and why the particular visual presentation is effective. Note that although the currently included examples are all PDF files, we are enhancing the site database and interface to handle other kinds of files, including files with interactive capabilities.

The eventual scope is suggested by the categories and classes in the selection window and is quite broad. The website’s database and indexing interface are designed to handle hundreds of examples. Two limitations are, however, pertinent. First, the website is a library of exemplars of visual tools, not a source of substantive data. Although most of the examples are from real cases, there is no intent to provide data about particular places or situations. The examples should not be used as a source of substantive information about the cases represented because data will be incomplete, out of date, and may be hypothetical. Second, this site is not a library of examples of successful or unsuccessful places or proposals. Thus, for example, we are not interested in photos, renderings, or reports of projects. Images will be included to demonstrate how to convey ideas, not to argue for the substance of the ideas presented. For example, a package of examples of visual tools for conveying ideas about street cross sections is appropriate, but not an argument for particular types of streets or a full catalog of street types.