Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Planning and design, especially in urban planning and architecture, are technical and transformative activities. Models drawn from the natural and social sciences are used to articulate the technical aspects, and those drawn from politics are used to articulate the transformative. Religion and theology provide a set of useful models, regularly employed by practicing planners and designers, for both kinds of activities.

Decisionmaking may be viewed as conversion; environmental planning is often about the creation of sacred places of Nature; and social planning may aim to transform the society leading it to a promised land. Designs are presented as provisions of order and gracefulness, their evaluation a matter of judgment, and their inauguration a process of creation. Plans are treated as authoritative documents subject to interpretation, and error in making and implementing plans is treated as a matter of the failure of a sinful human nature.

The models are described in this paper and it is shown how they influence the practice of planning and design. What is taken as scientific and secular seems often to be religious and theological.

Traditional models of rationality in science, bureaucracy, and planning are predicated on the existence of a set of means (x₁, x₂,…, x_n) being available to achieve a set of ends (y₁, y₂, …, y_n). In these models it is assumed that the ends are given and that there is an identifiable causal relationship between the means and the ends. In such a setting, ethical considerations, rooted as they are in subjective values, are seen as irrelevant and do not enter the calculus of the rational planner, scientist, or bureaucrat. The paper is an examination of rationality and value-neutrality in science, bureaucracy and planning, and it is concluded that there should be an explicit consideration and incorporation of ethics into theories of science, bureaucracy, and planning. The ethics argued for is one based on dialogue and synthesis, that overcomes difficulties posed by absolutist and relativist schools of ethics.

In this paper a systematic approach to dimensioning architectural floor plans to optimize multiple conflicting objectives is presented. The methodology is applied to solve the dimensioning problem of a house plan, where construction cost, total floor area and proportion ratio were considered the noncommensurable objectives.

Some empirical explorations of the use of the Galois lattice approach are presented as an alternative to the more traditional algorithm used by the Q-analysis research community. The explorations are conducted in the context of three fields of study: prey—predator relations, social networks, and clinical psychiatry. It is suggested that the Galois lattice approach is superior to the traditional Q-analysis algorithm on grounds of accuracy, precision, and economy, and that data interpretation previously guided by the traditional algorithm should be reappraised.

Few computer programs have been devised to assist local government planners draw up zoning schemes, despite the ubiquity of zoning schemes for expressing land-use plans. When one program, LUPLAN, representative of a broader class of plan-evaluation programs, was used to produce a zoning scheme, it was found to be fundamentally unsuited to what is essentially a political task. Perhaps the major difficulty lay in the reduction in LUPLAN of what is a highly complex decisionmaking task to a series of numerical manipulations. The ADAPT program, which has been specifically designed to overcome this and other problems, leaves most of the decisionmaking to the planner, but assists by providing relevant knowledge and data about each conflict — choice situation as it arises, and by keeping a record of decisions made and their underlying reasons. The reasons for the development of ADAPT are reminiscent of those that have led to the recent development of decision support systems (DSSs) for organizational management purposes, and many of the techniques used by ADAPT are similar to those used in knowledge-based systems. DSSs and knowledge-based systems are both described in some detail since they form a basis on which ADAPT, and similar decision-aiding programs, can be further developed.

An experiment is reported in which the relationship between judgments of goodness of example, interest, attractiveness, and preference is examined for a set of landscapes. Goodness-of-example judgments measure the discrepancy between an instance and a prototypical representation stored in a schema in memory. Both the type and the strength of affective responses to the environment are related to amount of discrepancy. The greater the discrepancy the stronger the affective response. The type of affective response changes with increases in discrepancy: for example, from attractive and pleasant, to stimulating and interesting, to exciting and complex, to threatening and ugly. Differences between groups in a culture are related to affective responses to discrepancy and not to differences between the schemata involved. Analyses of the sets of judgments on each of the scales for two groups with different backgrounds by means of the INDSCAL multidimensional scaling model confirms the predicted relationships between the scales and the groups. In addition, the unique orientation of the INDSCAL axes and the weights on the dimensions for each of the scales allowed inferences to be made about the meaning of each of the dimensions in relation to the landscapes, and the relations between the attributes of the dimensions and the goodness-of-example and affective scales.

City structure is taken to mean the size and shape of the city and the spatial concentration or dispersal of homes and workplaces. To classify differing structures, a land-use and transport interaction method, based on the classical transportation problem of operations research, is used. The theoretical upper and lower bounds to the amount of journey-to-work travel in the optimal solution leads to the calculation of the urban consolidation index. The behaviour of this index is examined for square and rectangular city shapes of differing sizes and distributions of workplaces. The method is then tested empirically with data on the distribution of homes and workplaces collected for fourteen cities in Australia and East and Southeast Asia ranging in size and land-use density. The relationship between optimisation theory and transport policy is discussed. The approach should prove to be a suitable quantitative method to examine the question of the efficiency of travel in cities both with different concentrations of activity and with different travel behaviour.