I am currently (as of late 2014) a full-time PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, in the Architecture, Building and Planning faculty, with the Australasian Center for the Governance and Management of Urban Transportation (GAMUT).
If you're interested in my research, check out my Google Scholar profile, ResearchGate page Academia.edu page, or my page on ImpactStory.
If you want to leave me a message, open a new section on my talk page.
My background re Sustainability, esp Sustainable Transport and Urbanism - and my PhD[edit | edit source]
I have had a long-term interest in working towards sustainable societies more broadly, over recent years I've pursued this particularly in relation to human settlement structure and Urban planning, with the goal of moving towards sustainable cities and regions. In this respect I'm inspired by the long tradition of urban planning with a utopian and progressive tinge, from the likes of Wikipedia:Ebenezer Howard and Wikipedia:Lewis Mumford, thru more modern ideas like Wikipedia:Christopher Alexander's. However, I try to leaven this with a solid dose of pragmatism and critical thinking, and think the best contributions to Planning are a balance of these two perspectives.
My PhD work focuses on how broader societal access to Open Source GIS capabilities and tools such as OpenTripPlanner could support envisioning and developing better Public transport, as part of a more sustainable transportation paradigm. I like to see this work as contributing towards a long-term collaboratively developed informatics platform to support sustainable transportation planning - tentatively called OSSTIP.
This work can also be situated within an emerging discipline and movement called Community Informatics (CI). CI amongst other things is concerned with how new information technology approaches can support better access and participation by communities in decision-making and planning - see the CIRN Wiki. This is also linked to investigating the relevance of ideas coming out of the Open source software movement for governance and planning - see the online book http://co-p2p.mlog.taik.fi/ as one interesting starting-point here.
Projects on Appropedia[edit | edit source]
Sustainable Transport Principles and Practices[edit | edit source]
I would be interested in working in improving the Transport portal in collaboration with others, especially in the area of Sustainable transport and Urban planning, while I work on my PhD. I see all of these as key areas in moving towards more Sustainable cities in general, in co-operation with personal behaviour changes of the sort ably covered in other areas of this site.
Some aspects of this include:
- Best practices given current research of public transport, such as Integrated Multimodal Network Planning and Public Transport Prioritisation (there are lots of great web resources to link to here);
- Indicator frameworks that can help gauge the current (un)-sustainability of a regions' transport system;
- Issues with current approaches to using computer tools as part of planning for the future of urban regions. In particular limitations of current transport models w.r.t. sustainability, and possible ways of improving these;
- Ideas, plans and policies that can support cycling as a low-impact form of effective short distance urban transport;
- Streetscape design (inc. traffic calming) to better support cycling and walking as a practicable mode(s) of travel;
- Deliberate efforts to land-use planning, urban design and culture to support all of the above in cities - e.g. medium density urban cohousing, and mixed-use communities;
- GIS and other computer tools to support the above goals;
As someone most familiar with the 'developed' world context of transport in Australian, British and US cities, probably my work would mostly be from this perspective, but hopefully it'll complement the other transport articles here, including those mostly aimed at more resource-constrained and rural transport planning.
The OSSTIP Project[edit | edit source]
I'd see this as corresponding to my main 'project' page on Appropedia related to my PhD, the aforementioned OSSTIP work that's part of my action-research with participating organizations here in Melbourne, which aims to make transport planning more open to citizen engagement and proposals for improvement.
I have set up an Appropedia:Books functionality for the project, to gather together key pages and allow ready export to PDF/ODT - at User:PatSunter/Books/OSSTIP-SustTransportReference.
External Links[edit | edit source]
As a start, some blogs I like in different areas:
Scientific software, open science, S/W in education, S/W in policy debates:
- http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/ - Serendipity:- Applying systems thinking to computing, climate and sustainability
- http://climatecode.org
- http://allmodelsarewrong.com/
- http://third-bit.com/
S/W architecture and development practitioners more generally:
Cycling-oriented blogs:
Some exciting new informatics tools or project to support collaborative decision-making about complex issues:
- http://web.archive.org/web/20210102184658/https://consider.it/ (and related Knight Foundation grant application);
- https://www.loomio.org/ - https://www.loomio.org/ - FOSS Software tool for collaborative discussion and decision-making.
My subpages[edit | edit source]
Appropedia working page helpers etc[edit | edit source]
- Redirects: #REDIRECT [[Target page]]
- Stubs: {{Stub}}
- Interwiki to Wikipedia: [[wikipedia:Topic page]].
- List of all Interwikis: Interwiki map