Observations on Local Government IT

The San Francisco Archipelago

Transport politics in a future community.

I know a lot of Councils are including modeling of sea level rises as part of their long term planning. Higher water levels will not only affect the use of areas that will potentially be submerged but also change the connectivity between land that will still be above water.

Our human scale of time tends to treat coastlines as a permanent thing. This imagined newspaper report on the politics of transport planning in a future San Francisco Archipelago not only allows people to visualize the future but start to imagine what life might be like in that future.

I have this kind of implicit assumption that future sea level modeling closer to home will be published as a navigable map that people can explore and imagine what life might be like in that potential future world. It would be even better to see local government engaging the community by telling this story as… well… a story. Then again they all may just opt for the traditional few hundred pages of text and a few static maps.