My new edited volume, titled Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities, is now available online through Springer. The book features peer-reviewed papers which will be presented at the 14th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM 2015), a conference to be held at MIT in Boston on July 7-10, 2015. The book is co-edited by myself and Joseph Ferreira, Jr., the conference program co-chairs, as well as Stan Geertman and John Stillwell, two leading researchers in the area of planning support systems and GIS who have edited of several previous volumes on similar topics.

The book’s 25 chapters are organized into several parts: (1) Data Analytics, (2) Smart Cities, (3) Planning Support Systems (PSS) and Public Engagement, (4) PSS: New Methods and Tools. The contributions include papers on urban modeling, visualization, simulation, public participation GIS, information infrastructure, and other topics.

In addition to serving as an editor, together with Peter Pelzer and Marco te Brömmelstroet I contributed a chapter titled “Facilitating PSS Workshops: A Conceptual Framework and Findings from Interviews with Facilitators.” Drawing on our previous empirical research on how PSS are used in planning contexts, we developed a new framework to describe the crucial role of facilitation, and validated and extended the framework through interviews with experienced Dutch and American PSS facilitators.

The entire book or individual chapters can be purchased here. The online version on SpringerLink is available for free through libraries with digital subscriptions to the Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography series.