The ESC, in collaboration with the ACP Planning and Visioning, assisted the Baltimore Metropolitan Council in looking beyond issues of mobility to identify a broad regional consensus on issues such as land use and development patterns, transportation alternatives, the environment, and economic development. 

The first phase of the project involved the ESC using extensive GIS analysis to identify and create maps of potential developable areas within the five counties and City of Baltimore region and to compare the available land area with the region's projected growth needs.  Planning workshops were conducted where stakeholders distributed projected development on these maps at various densities, enabling the participants to clearly see the relationships between development pressures and open space protection, density thresholds needed to support public transportation, and regional sustainability. This enabled citizens to make more informed choices and was critical in reaching consensus on three distinct development strategies. Prototypical examples of these strategies were then modeled in an accurate, interactive, real-time 3D environment so that citizens and stakeholders would be able to visualize the impacts of each strategy in aesthetic as well as analytical terms. The simulations, visualizations, analysis, and data are all mutually accountable to each other, and will be presented at 17 workshops throughout the region over the spring and summer of 2002. Initial staff and stakeholder comments have been very favorable – citing the usefulness of the 3D modeling and analysis in highlighting, in an understandable way, the impacts of regional growth and the alternative ways in which the region could grow.