81 Jack Nasar, in The Evaluative Image of the City, 1998, has developed a method of empirically measuring what people like and dislike about the built form of their city, and then using these responses to create an evalu- ative map that can be used as a guide to improve city appearance. In this paper we re-conceptualize his model; where he used traditional surveys and manual plotting of respondent’s data onto maps, we use Internet technology as the primary tool for communi- cation with the public and a GIS system for automati- cally compiling and mapping responses. In extending Nasar’s technique in this way, we found that the Web is becoming an increasingly accessible medium for engaging the public in participatory planning. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the advantages and the disadvantages of using the Web as a research and planning tool. Introduction The case study and planning method described in this paper are based on the work of Jack Nasar, who, in his book The Evaluative Image of the City (1998), builds upon on the influential ideas of the planner and urban designer Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City 1960). Both authors stress that the public’s image of a city is valuable to city planners and urban designers and that the most important measure of city form is the evalu- ation by those people who live in it, work in it and experience it on a daily basis. This case study utilizes a Web-based survey as a tool to discover public pref- erences which can then be used as a guide in shaping and reshaping neighborhood design. Nasar suggests that it is possible to learn the public’s preferences by empirically measuring them. Just as we weigh objects to find how light or heavy they are, Nasar says that we can measure preferences to determine the degree to which people like or dislike various areas of a city. Nasar employed the evaluative method in two U.S. cities—Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee. His team interviewed 160 residents and 120 visitors. The resident interviews were conducted by phone and the visitor interviews were conducted in person with a city map as an aid. The participants were asked to iden- tify up to five areas that they liked visually and five areas they disliked visually. Interviewers probed to discover the boundaries of the areas mentioned. Then they asked the respondents to state the reasons for their responses. A single map was created for each respon- dent, representing that person’s evaluative image of the city. The individual maps were then overlaid to create two composite maps, one for residents and one for visitors. These maps showed the location and lik- ability of visual features, and the degree of consensus for the evaluation. The maps provided a basis for a visual plan to guide the future appearance of the cit- ies. In evaluating his method, Nasar wrote that the devel- opment of the composite maps by overlaying individual maps on one another proved somewhat imprecise (85). He suggested that a GIS could be used to divide the study area into cells, allowing the coding of likability scores at a finer grain and with more precise mapping. It would also allow mapping of the intensity of prefer- ences. Use of computer coding would also reduce re- searcher discretion in defining boundaries (91). In Nasar’s original surveys, researchers had to ask many open-ended questions to determine the boundaries of elements being described. Computer-based maps and photographs could help respondents delineate areas and boundaries. Planners and designers at the University of Illinois at Chicago sought to adapt Nasar’s method of measur- ing public preferences to guide city design in an on- going community-based planning process. However, instead of using traditional survey methods and manual mapping techniques, they incorporated some of the changes suggested above. The team decided to use Internet technology to communicate with the public and GIS technology to analyze the collected data. The goal was to combine real time interaction over the Internet with GIS visualization capabilities. A review of current literature found that this kind of social sci- ence research is still in the experimental stages with respect to public participation in planning and design, Employing the World Wide Web (WWW) in Community Planning: Advancing Nasars Work on Urban Likability and Dislikability Kheir Al-Kodmany University of Illinois at Chicago