User:PatSunter: Difference between revisions

I am currently (as of 2012) a full-time PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, with the Australasian Center for the Governance and Management of Urban Transportation (GAMUT). If you're interested in my research, check out my Academia.edu page.

My main research interests and background re Sustainability, esp Sustainable Transport and Urbanism

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 tinge, from the likes of Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumford, thru more modern ideas like Chris Alexander's.

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.

I am also interested in how this kind of work and thinking could contribute to what people like Michel Bauwens have called a Peer-to-Peer commons-based economy and society. My page over at the [P2P Foundation] website is at http://p2pfoundation.net/Patrick_Sunter. An interesting online book addressing these ideas and how they might influence the future of how we organise government and the state is at http://co-p2p.mlog.taik.fi/.

Projects on Appropedia

I would be interested in working in improving the Transport portal in collaboration with others, especially in the area of Sustainable transport, while I work on my PhD.

Some aspects of this include:

• Best practices given current research of public transport network planning;
• 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;
• Streetscape design to better support cycling as a practicable mode of travel;
• 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.

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 organisations here in Melbourne, which aims to make transport planning more open to citizen engagement and proposals for improvement.

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