A computer package to facilitate inhabitants' participation in urban renewal

Abstract

CAM.UR is a software package developed to assist in the renewal of an urban area considered as a whole and not simply building by building. It is at the same time concerned with improvements to urban open spaces. It operates at a scale of action between planning and architecture, which has tended to be neglected in the past by both professions, for the main reason that this demands consideration and action at many scales and levels of interest. CAM.UR is an attempt to acknowledge and protect the general interest as well as the interests of particular parties, by proposing a management framework which operates both at general and at particular levels, and which translates information produced by each party into terms comprehensible to all others. The forms of input, output, and access to information generally are major preoccupations in CAM.UR. Many people, both professionals and lay people, are users or would like to be users of the information which has been built up for a given area, but which is often inaccessible. In the context of urban renewal, that information may be held in many different locations and different formats. The CAM.UR software overcomes these difficulties by means of an efficient database management system coupled to a specially designed user interface.