Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

The radical restructuring of New Zealand's planning system in 1991 was based on the Resource Management Act and significant amendments to the Local Government Act 1974. In this paper we report a study of urban planning in New Zealand under this new regime. Amendments to the Local Government Act were designed in large part to facilitate the administration of the Resource Management Act, the authors of which wanted to emphasise the sustainable management of the biophysical environment and dramatically to limit local government's involvement in urban and social planning. Ironically, the strategic planning provisions of the amended Local Government Act gave local government contradictory powers. We discuss the nature of this contradiction and its impacts on the ways in which district planning under the Resource Management Act and strategic planning under the Local Government Act have combined to create new and unforseen approaches to urban planning and management in New Zealand.

Buttons or tabs are function keys on a computer screen that are designed to facilitate users' direct manipulations. One increasingly popular application of the button technique in a GIS environment is weighted map overlays for land suitability assessment. Here, buttons are coded with weighting values to indicate maps' importance to their associations. There are, however, a number of flaws in the existing button designs that can affect the quality of land-suitability assessment. In this paper, we first examine two common problems of redundancy and underrepresentation in button design, and then present a button system that is free from these problems.

State-of-the-art computer technology has improved the integration of different types of representations and data and has provided new possibilities for manipulating results. Consequently, the use of computers has been widespread in urban design and the planning process. The potential that computer virtual environments brought for describing future developments to the public at large is enormous. Nevertheless, when imagery and realism dominate the communication process, they may obscure important issues that relate more to the underlying logic of urban design fabric. A sample of 23 university students from nonarchitecture courses and a sample of 23 students from architecture (contrasted group design) were used for analysing differences in their evaluation on form and content of a video presentation concerning an urban design project in Lisbon. The urban design project was focused on an important avenue of the city—Avenida da Liberdade. Several representation methods and different techniques for viewing images were used on video presentation: photography, colour film, 3D-rendered model with animation, plans, and photomontage. The results highlighted the power that imagery and realistic computer models have, when used in an unbalanced way, for overshadowing differences between subjects. This is because at the end of the questionnaire both groups had a positive opinion about the urban design project, but significant differences were found in relation to their evaluation and understanding of both content and form of video presentation.

A new type of dynamic spatial model is described: graph-cellular automatoa (graph-CA). First, the proximal model of space and geo-algebra are briefly introduced. Then, the graph-CA model is described, with an emphasis on understanding it as a reworking of the proximal model of space and also of geo-algebra. It is shown that graph-CA with particular structural properties defined in terms of the relationships between subsets of cells are a useful generalisation of traditional cellular automaton (CA) which enable meaningful descriptions of model structure to be developed. This enables further development of novel types of model in the same ‘family’ while retaining links to simpler, better understood examples. It is further argued that the derivation of the graph-CA from both the graph and CA formalisms permits the simultaneous use of well-developed ways of describing model structure and process dynamics, and that this could form the basis of a research programme into the elusive relations between the two. The relationship of graph-CA to other discrete models is briefly discussed, and a classification scheme which indicates the particular geographical interest of such models is suggested.

In this paper we present an evolutionary approach to the emergence of the representation of style in design. We explore issues involved in the interpretation of style, the emergence of the representation of style, and a computational process for emerging the representation of style. An evolutionary process model based on genetic engineering for style representation emergence is developed and demonstrated. Examples from its computational implementation are presented.

A constrained cellular automata (CA) model based on ‘grey cells’ for the simulation of different types of urban forms and developments is developed within a raster GIS. Remote sensing and GIS are used to supply information on environmental constraints and locations of growth centers for the simulation. The model is able to consider different criteria, such as urban forms, environmental suitability, and land consumption for the planning of sustainable cities. Seven different types of urban forms and developments that range from compact–monocentric, compact–polycentric, compact–monocentric–environmental, compact–polycentric–environmental, dispersed, highly dispersed, to very highly dispersed developments were simulated by using the model. The model can generate urban forms and developments with fractal structures that are close to real cities. The simulated patterns were evaluated by using different cost indicators related to sustainable development principles.

Transaction cost theory (TCT), explaining economic institutions, applies to the public sector too. TCT accounts for public land-use planning and development control, and suggests some alternative forms that governance of land development and the property market could take. The basic elements of a conceptual model enabling the institutional analysis of land-use planning and development control systems are: (1) an integrated TCT; (2) a transactions-based representation of the land and real-estate development process; and (3) a repertoire of alternative forms of governance, ranging from statutory planning and regulation to contractual covenants. These elements are developed for application in an institutional analysis of the Israeli statutory planning system.

In this paper, we use the question “what is the true nature of traditional street networks in Turkish cities?” to test different quantitative methods of urban morphological analysis. Traditional Turkish street networks are characterized by discriminant functions of several space-syntax-related indices, as well as by image-analysis and graph-theoretical indices. A set of space-syntactic indices is found to be powerful enough to distinguish the traditional street network among others, particularly axial ringiness, implying that the formation of large blocks is a typical feature. The relative abundance of closed-end edges is found to be another important feature of the traditional street network.