Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

The origins, purpose, and scope of the Non-Domestic Building Stock (NDBS) database of England and Wales are described. Nondomestic buildings are defined and sources of the data used in the database are identified. The structure of the database, and the role of the classification of nondomestic buildings, are described and discussed.

In this paper we describe the selection of four English urban areas in which the nondomestic building stocks might collectively be considered characteristic of the national stock. A brief history is provided of urban development in each of the four areas. The scope and methodology of comprehensive surveys of nondomestic buildings in the four survey areas are described and a brief summary of the characteristics of the building stocks in the four areas is derived from the survey data.

This paper gives a summary of the fundamental features of the methods used to collect and record information on energy use in nondomestic buildings. The influence on these methods of the essential data requirements for creating a national database of energy use in the UK nondomestic building stock is described. The development of suitable techniques for energy surveying, data recording, and subsequent analysis is explained briefly. Detailed descriptions of standard procedures for collecting relevant information, recording data in machine-readable form, and producing results on energy use are provided, by using an appropriate example for illustration.

In this paper I will describe data provided by the UK Valuation Office (VO) for the national Non-Domestic Building Stock database developed for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. The purpose of this database is to support policymaking for the conservation of fossil fuels and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that the VO data cover floor areas, activities, building construction, and building services—all of which are liable to affect the use of fuels in buildings—make them specially valuable for this application. Several tables and charts derived from the VO data are presented, containing statistics on the nondomestic building stock of England and Wales. A review is then given of the very considerable research potential of such a large administrative data source as the VO databases. Some of the problems that arise in the use of those data are examined.

The Smallworld GIS has been customised to create a means of representing the three-dimensional forms of buildings. To do this, buildings are broken down into “floor polygons”, among whose attributes are floor level and storey height. Data for nondomestic buildings at 3350 addresses in four English towns have been entered into Smallworld, and measurements made of floor areas, roof areas, and exposed wall areas. Floor polygons may be reaggregated into premises, built forms, or by other attributes. Several applications in energy analysis and urban planning are described.

A classification of built forms is presented. It is based on a study of buildings surveyed at 3350 addresses in four English towns and has been designed for use in the national Non-Domestic Building Stock (NDBS) database developed for the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions. As the prime use of the database is in energy analysis, the classification focuses on the external envelopes of buildings. (Materials of construction, servicing systems, and activities are classified separately.) Built forms are distinguished according to two main criteria: the broad “texture” of their internal subdivision; and whether they are daylit or artificially lit.

In this paper we propose a combined land-use and transportation model for work trips with constraints on the road network capacity. A Lowry-type land-use model is used to distribute all the given activities into various residential and employment zones. Trip distributions are based on the equilibrium round-trip cost, which is obtained from a network equilibrium model. A bilevel programming approach is used to determine the maximum number of trips that can be accommodated by the road network subject to the network-capacity constraints.

The use of analogy, including visual analogy, is a powerful problem-solving strategy that can help explain new problems in terms of familiar ones. There is evidence that problem-solvers have difficulty in making spontaneous use of this strategy, despite its proven effectiveness. However, guidance to use it greatly increases accessibility to analogy in problem-solving. In the design domain, evidence of the use of analogy has hitherto been mostly anecdotal. Our goal in this paper is to show through empirical data that analogy can be effective in facilitating design problem-solving, especially when explicit instructions for its use are given.

An analytic method founded on the mathematical structure of symmetry groups is defined and some applications to the analysis of architectural designs are shown.

Heuristic concentration (HC) is a metaheuristic for the solution of certain combinatorial problems. In stage one, a concentration set (CS), consisting of nodes likely to be in the optimal solution, is developed by multiple runs of an interchange heuristic. In stage two, a good, usually optimal, solution is constructed by selecting the best nodes from the CS. The CS is effective when it is small but comprehensive. Both of these characteristics depend upon: (1) the robustness of the heuristic; (2) the number of times it is run, q; and (3) the number of “best” solutions used to create the CS, m. Stage two is thus totally dependent upon the efficiency of stage one for the improved, and at least potentially optimal, solution. Proper values for the parameters m and q increase the probability of selecting correct elements to construct the optimal solution in stage two and to decrease the work in its identification. After a consideration of the robustness of two alternative interchange heuristics I will concentrate on the appropriate values for the parameters m and q. This is an empirical examination and the p-median problem is used throughout.

In most parts of Europe compact city policies have become a popular means of planning for sustainability. Dense compact cities were seen as solutions to reduce continually increasing mobility. They were also seen as a way to avoid urbanization of the countryside. Lately planners have been expressing serious doubts about the impact of these positive effects of the compact city concept. Planners in the Netherlands are instead shifting their attention more to environmental dilemmas which result, in part, from compact city policies. A number of these dilemmas are caused by frictions between environmentally sensitive and environmentally intrusive functions in a compact urban setting. Traditionally these dilemmas or conflicts were taken care of by using a functional rationality approach, that is one emphasizing direct causal relations between cause and effect. In the Netherlands this has resulted in a top-down policy, urging local authorities to keep enough distance between conflicting functions. Unfortunately the compact city concept adds an extra dimension to the problem, favouring mixed use and a dense urban area. Keeping distance can therefore no longer be the primary solution to environmental conflicts in urban areas. Environment conflicts have become, so to speak, more complex owing to spatial pressure and to a growing number of different interests that have to be taken into account. Functional rationality approaches may no longer be sufficient to solve these complex dilemmas or conflicts. Rather than keeping distance as the only possible solution to deal with conflicting functions, in the Netherlands local participation is also recognized as an effective approach towards some of the more complex conflicts. This communicative approach is gradually gaining acceptance in the Netherlands—and in other parts of the world as well—as a potential method for dealing with planning issues. In this paper functional and communicative rationality are seen as two extremes of the same spectrum, with complexity as the key word linking the two together. This has lead to the following thesis: the effectiveness and efficiency of a solution will depend on the assignment of the conflict's complexity. In this case, complexity is no longer seen as a metaphor, but instead as essential for examining planning issues, including environmental conflicts in compact cities.