In Conversation with Renia Kagkou
This transcript is an informal conversation between Dan Lu (MAUD ‘21), Naksha Satish (MAUD ‘22) and Renia Kagkou on April 29th, 2021.
Renia Kagkou works at Esri's Smart Cities Group, where she develops workflows that integrate geospatial analysis, scenario testing, and impact assessment, for decision-making in urban development. She supports AEC firms on leveraging these workflows for planning and design work. She holds a MAUD and a MDes ULE from Harvard GSD (2018).
Dan Lu (DL):
How do you see our virtual and physical experiences with cities intertwined? How do you see data not only as an analytical tool but also an implementation tool with apps?
Renia Kagkou (RK):
I'll use digital twins as the focal point for tying this together, because it's the hype in the industry right now - to replicate your physical environment in a digital virtual environment, where you can then test behavior and different things before it’s applied physically. That's one way of seeing it. If we try to push that definition, one could say it's not just about the hype of the technology that goes, but it's really a platform on which you can begin to plug stakeholders and agencies. So it becomes a participation tool where the digital twin is leveraged for a participatory collaborative process of analysis, speculation and design.
We all are all very familiar with the analysis and decision-making support the abundance of data there is out there can offer. But I think the idea that you can generate information based on your proposed project, enables you to compare that information. So that's how we would see digital twins. Now within that context, when we think about the interaction between the physical and the digital, and the experience between the two, not only can you engage your community and do the analysis and design, but then you can also test that experience. It can be as literal as testing your different scenarios, and putting them into a walkthrough VR experience and having your users sit in Boston Commons and switch between two different scenarios and see if they feel okay with a raise of height limitation around Boston Commons, or if the shadows will start to feel a little bit more claustrophobic in that space. So it's, of course, not the same as reality, but you can begin to inform the virtual environments that are as close as you want to a realistic experience. I value this a lot for decision making. The same way we used to use a physical model, we would raise it, look at it, and move pieces around and test; This is just a much more informed, digitized and efficient way of doing it.
DL:
What is the role of the tools in enhancing community participation and engagement ?
RK:
This is what I would say are key values of ArcGIS Urban or of such similar tools. It’s not just about engagement and negotiation, but also about decision making, visualizations, storytelling, and marrying the two aspects of participation. It’s useful since you are narrating in a 3D environment, rather than a 2D - a medium through which your general audience can understand better. We are all very familiar with 2D maps, but the rest of the world is not trained to be comfortable with them. So I would say it's a 3D, analytical, and projected map - all at the same time!
Naksha Satish (NS):
Do you see these tools being limited to users with design expertise? Or are they designed to be used by non-design users? Can a one use this to navigate the developments in the city by oneself?
RK:
The program has been built to have different levels of engagement. At the personal level, I as a user can go in and design it. As an expert, I can propose something, analyze and project alternative solutions. Then, the team can also work collaboratively within the company. Alternatively, one can also drop comments by using the public engagement option. At the second level, where there are external engagements, among companies, city planning departments and consultants, ArcGISUrban can be used as an orchestrating tool for communication. With the online account, it is easy to exchange information with different stakeholders and industry experts, bring them together and assess on a common platform. The third tier of engagement would be with the community. This is where the entire model is made open to public review. This can be incorporated as a web page on the planning department website and drives community charrettes and feedback through that page.
These are the three different levels of engagement. The important thing here is that none of these are about the design of an object. This is something I wanted to highlight - rather than doing a beautiful Zaha Hadid style museum here, with these tools you are designing urban systems.
NS:
What is the larger impact of these tools on the AEC industry and where do you see the disruption?
RK:
I see a lot of disruption in the business aspect of AEC, not really in the development or practical implementation aspects. It's more significant from a business perspective. In the design, of course, it can create efficiencies, and it can create a lot more accessibility to out-of-the-box information that previously involved a lot of manual work . From a business perspective, I wouldn't say disrupting, I would say modernizing. A lot of the firms that I see, talk to and work with, have very, very complex consulting tasks, often with questions that are much more intricate than a design analysis. To them, ArcGISUrban is one tool where they can begin to orchestrate with their other collaborators and stakeholders better.
When a large firm is doing the overall master plan for a city, they will do that in ArcGISUrban, but only at a more schematic level. Then they might have five other big firms working under them in different neighborhoods of that city. ArcGISUrban might be used as the driving strategy. They don’t have to share multiple CAD files internally and can download directly from ArcGISUrban to any formats. It can become a really easy orchestration tool.
Another moment is - I see a lot of firms are trying to build custom consulting tools. For example, engineering and design firms are engaging with the city to achieve larger goals like Resiliency, Sustainable Development Goals, and Social Equity. As they expand their business, the software allows them to investigate different KPI that would help generate the metrics for new consultation services. We're seeing that approach.
Another trend is, many designers and firms want to provide a master-plan service to the city along with their services; a digital twin that the city can keep using and leverage for other operations. By doing so, they can get called back from the city to maintain that environment. So suddenly they're becoming like an IT business as they are getting comfortable with technologies.
DL:
Is there a way to develop the software to incorporate the context and make it site specific - like cultural aspects, local typologies and so on?
RK:
Coming from the spatial design discipline, we do recognize these differences in our design. However, the agenda from a software development perspective, is to create a platform that everyone can use. So when you go with that strategy, your approach becomes more basic, foundational. But you start creating ways in which additional information can be incorporated as customization from the user’s end. The platform doesn't recognize different typologies internally.
For example, In one of the projects I worked on in CBD Tokyo, the sky planes were not defined specific to context. But the mass and the way they tilt are similar to what we have here. One can contextualize that by small back-end coding to achieve custom zoning envelopes. In the future, as the solution evolves, those things will also be something that you could do directly in ArcGIS Urban , you could just create your own rules the same way KPIs and associations between them are being created now.
DL:
What is the inspiration at every stage of your cross-disciplinary career approach? Do you see that an average designer today is expected to take this multifaceted approach?
RK:
I wouldn't say it's a should or shouldn’t. Designers are already well positioned. Our education is so multifaceted. We learn to be more generalists than a deep diver niche expert. We're also great narrators, great storytellers, great visual communicators. So suddenly, you can sit well in that moderator position in any bundle or combination of disciplines that need to come together to work and solve a problem. That as a default strategy is maybe something that I'm realizing more often as I get older.
My path personally started from architecture. From the very childish approach - Oh, I love art. And I'm good with math and engineering. So why not? In my final years in architecture, I wasn't very happy with the imaginary restraints of a single site. I'd seem too small. The questions seemed a little bit too simple. They were just not as complex and they didn't make you say, wait a minute, I need to think about this really well. That's why I started looking at the larger scale, and I fell in love with the urban scale, as it brought in more layers that I was missing, such as questions about sociology, equity, economics, nature and preservation. So I liked that scale!
And when I dived into this scale, my site of exploration was Athens, in my home country. And there was a complete lack of data for anything. I started seeing and appreciating the value of having that information that helps you ground reality rather than just going with your own intuition. And that's where I started really appreciating GIS.
So I came into Harvard with this idea of combining urban scale and GIS through the urban design degree. I was out of an art school. I was suddenly fascinated with the diversity and variety of courses that you could take not only at the GSD, but throughout all of Harvard.
As I did my dual degree, I designed my curriculum with studio and elective courses from various schools. I was familiar with the critique that the UPD department had of free market economics - but I wanted to explore the other side through courses on micro and macro economics. It was a diverse approach and I took courses from MIT and Harvard on economics, international development, sustainability finance. Of course all of those pockets of knowledge where not fully capitalized by my thesis, but they definitely informed my way of thinking and allowed me to understand things as more complex questions and just a slice cut from its surroundings. So it's always been more about expanding my systems boundaries, if I can say it like that!