HOUSING WORKSHOP
Spring 1996
Ayse Pamuk
Problem Set #1: Housing Related Resources on the Internet
Due: February 7 with in-class presentation
Client:
The Maryland-National Capital Park & Planning Commission
Prince George's County Planning Department
Problem:
The M-NCPPC is seeking to improve older established communities in Prince George's County. The agency has recently focused its efforts to build a strong coalition among residents, nonprofit groups, the private sector, and other government agencies to help revitalize the Suitland Manor neighborhood. You are their newly hired planning director, fresh out of graduate school, and full of innovative ideas on using the internet. You would like to help build patnerships and encourage investments in the community while paying close attention to its location in the metropolitan region. You will be writing your very first strategic document for the agency staff advising your staff on how best to use the internet to support the agency's daily planning functions. Based on your graduate level course work on housing policy at UVA you decided to focus on the following issue areas:
The geographic scope of your research on the internet will cover Suitland Manor in the context of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region (Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Montgomery, Prince George, Alexandria, Washington, D.C.). Your memo will include links to useful sites you have identified.
Output:
Please post your results on the PLAC544 home page designed for this course (http://palladio.arch.virginia.edu/~plac544). Be prepared to present your findings to the rest of the class on February 7th. Feel free to be creative in designing the structure of your WWW page in order to make it user-friendly for the public and your colleagues at the agency. However, focus on the substance and developing your own thoughts about the usefulness of the WWW in planners' practice today. Refer to the Handout on Planner's Introduction to the WWW for HTML instructions.
Planner's Introduction to the World Wide Web
What is the World Wide Web?
The Internet, the physical foundation on which the World Wide Web (WWW) rests, is a supranational network of computers connected both by wires and by a common communication protocol, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internetworking Protocol). It has evolved as a loose federation without central administration and, therefore, with no one person or organization in control.
The Web is a large-scale networked hypertext information system started by CERN, the European Laboratory for particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. It can understand the numerous different information-retrieval protocols (such as Gopher, WAIS, FTP, and Telnet) in use on the Internet today as well as the data formats of those protocols, and provide a single consistent user-interface to them all. In addition, these programs understand new protocols (HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol) and a new data format (HTML - hypertext markup language), both geared toward hypermedia.
The first generation of Web servers was populated mostly with information shared by physicists. The second generation was populated primarily by technical research literature. Today, we're into a third generation of servers providing access to a wide range of users.
Viewers, or browsers, are programs used to view the Web. Examples include: Netscape, Lynx, Mosaic, and Cello. The ability of these programs to understand existing protocols means that they can access the huge body of Gopherspace, FTP files, WAIS databases and news articles already existing on the Internet today. In addition, large amounts of new hypertext is being introduced through HTTP and HTML.
How Can the World Wide Web be Useful for Planners' Practice?
The last several years saw an explosion of information available on the internet. In the first 4 weeks of this workshop we will be exploring how planners can best use the internet to enhance their daily professional practice. Increasing number of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and advocacy groups (e.g. environmental groups, Non Governmental Organizations in the Third World) have begun creating their own home pages and making information available on the internet for the public. The ease of access to data, maps and recent information should accelerate the process of sharing of information and ideas across different localities, agencies and people facilitating an informed plan-making process. As a start, on the PLAC544 home page you will find some sites that are potentially useful for planners working on housing and local economic development projects.
What are Hypertext and Hypermedia?
Hypertext is a term for a computer interface to text which allows cross-referencing to other documents imbedded in the text to be followed. The user can follow cross-references by selecting a cross-referenced phrase. This brings up the document at the "other end" of the cross-reference. Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext - it is any medium with pointers to other media, allowing browsers to display images, sound, video, or animation.
Documents on the Web are named using URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). A URL looks like: http://palladio.arch.virginia.edu/plac544. It consists of three parts - the method or protocol of retrieving the document (http), a machine name or address (palladio.arch.virginia.edu), and a path name (plac544) providing the physical location of the document in the directory.
How can I view the Web?
To access the Web, you run a browser or a viewer program. The browser/viewer reads documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers such as VLIN set up hypermedia servers from which browsers/viewers can get documents.
For this class, we will use Netscape to access planning information and data within and beyond University of Virginia. To launch Netscape, double click on the Netscape icon. After Netscape launches, you can either type in the known address of a desired location, or you can click on the "search" menu listing and type in key words in the blank provided. Once the key words have been typed, hit return and wait for Netscape to create a list of possible addresses.
How can I set up my own Web page using HTML?
To set up your own Web page you must first obtain a UNIX account with the ITC, if you don not already have one. Once you get access to your account, you can use the U-Menu functions to create your HTML files. Select File Management/File Editor/Create a new file options from the U-Menu to create your HTML file. You can also upload files from the hard drive of your computer or from a floppy diskette using the U-Menu functions or FTP protocols. You will need to save your document (e.g. Word for Windows file) as a text file (ascii) first.
In order for your files to be viewed by anyone on the Web you will need to create a new directory and provide some specifications . Go to UNIX prompt and type mkdir public_html. Then type the following:
chmod 755 public_html
cd ..
chmod 711
Please refer to your paper handout for the following topics: